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The Greater America 




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O 



The 
Greater 
America 



by 
Ralph D. Paine 

Author of "The Story of Martin Coe,' 
'*7ke Fraying Skipper,'* etc. 



Johnson, Blagden & McTurnan 

NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO 



Copyright, 1907, 

BY THE 

OUTING PUBLISHING CO. 



Copyright, iQH. 
JOHNSON, BLAGDEN & McTURNAN, Inc. 



Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, Eng. 



All rights reserved. 



£ci.A3ia7Hr 



CONTENTS 



I The Call of the Inland Sea . 

II Past and Present at the " Soo " 

III The Story of a Copper Mine 

IV The Confusion of a Prophet . 
V The Peopling of the Prairie 

VI The Magnet of the Wheat 

VII " Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed 

Farmer 

VIII The Last of the Open Range . 

IX Jack Teal and Some Others 

X The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

XI The Cow Puncher versus Irrigation 

XII The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

XIII The Man Who Found Himself 

XIV A Breath from Alaska 

XV Along Pacific Water-Fronts 

V 



I 

H 
32 
54 
63 
80 

94 
104 
117 

135 
152 
158 
178 
192 
204 



Contents 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XVI On the Pilot Schooner's Deck . . 215 

XVII Twentieth Century Argonauts . . 229 

XVIII Where Ranch and City Meet . . 244 

XIX Gold Camps of the Desert . . . 263, 

XX On the Road to Bullfrog . . . 256 

XXI The Men of the Untamed Desert . 298 

XXII In Conclusion 321 



VI 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

On Puget Sound, where commerce seeks the Orient 

Frontispiece i, 

Facing 
Page 

The vanishing lake carrier of other days . . . 4^ 
The modern freighter; a steel trough with a lid on it . 4 ^, 

The old way of handling cargo 12 1^ 

Where steam nas succeeded brawn .... 121 

The Soo — the mightiest link between the East and West 13 1- 

Where copper is king 32 ^ 

The toilers of the copper country 33'. 

The railroad's difficulties in winter . . . .50 
This piece of country has surely been torn to a frazzle 51. 
Scooping up the rich ore from the earth's surface . 62 
The low sod house of the homesteader .... 64'. 
Sprouting buildings from the prairie grow with incon- 
ceivable rapidity 64. 

The railroad was marching * * * two miles a day 65 

A prairie water wagon 741 

The water-witcher at work 74 

The bank is one of the earliest buildings in the town 75' 

The magnet of the wheat 90 

Blue ribbon live stock — prairie bred . . . . 91 - 

vii 



Illustrations 



A Montana round-up of twenty-five years ago . 

Picked survivors of the lost legion 

A Montana sheep ranch ..... 

The round-up camp ...... 

A freighter's outfit 

The first time in harness ..... 

The new king of the cattle range 

Pioneer irrigation ...... 

" The ' donkey ' * * * was yanking it home hand 

over fist "....... 

" Huge logs loomed amid this woodland wreckage " 

The pilot boat at sea ..... 

One of the last of a noble race 

The shack of the Forty-niner .... 

A monster that makes hash of the landscape . 

A corner of Santa Anita ranch .... 

"Lucky" Baldwin's thoroughbreds at pasture . 

In the Mexican quarter of Santa Anita 

A Mexican sheep herder and his flock 

In the heart of a gold camp .... 

A residence section of Tonopah 

The main street of Goldfield .... 

Hauling ore from a mine of fabulous richness . 

A chauffeur of the desert and his car 

viii 



Facing 
Page 



Illustrations 



A desert pass on the Goldfield road . 
Moving-day in the desert . . . . . 
The stage station " thirty miles from nowhere " 
The desert freighter ten days out from port 
Freighters watering at an oasis . . . . 
Prospectors in the heart of the hostile desert . 



Facing 
Page 

294 '^ 

295 > 

306' 

307'' 

318" 

319 



IX 



INTRODUCTION 

This book is a record of Impressions of a western 
journey undertaken for the purpose of getting out 
among some of the millions of good Americans who 
are doing their day's work as they find it, with a 
cheerful faith in themselves and an abounding confi- 
dence in the future of their country. This product 
of my note-books contains nothing that is startlingly 
new, nor does it pretend to be more than a series of 
glimpses of the splendid activities of the American 
West of to-day. I hope, however, that I have been 
able to catch, here and there, the spirit of that crea- 
tive energy which has wrought such a marvelous 
transformation within the span of a single lifetime, 
and of the dauntless vigor and enterprise which have 
not yet lost the bold and picturesque flavor that is 
essentially and typically American. 

I know an old town on the Kennebec, in the 
" State o' Maine," which holds, embalmed In fra- 
grant traditions, the life and memories of bygone 
generations that played a noble part In the early 
building of the nation. Beside the river winds the 
main street, beneath whose majestic elms are rows 
of white houses with green blinds, not one of which 
was built less than a century ago. Along the valley 
beyond the town are weather-worn farmhouses with 

xi 



Introduction 



shambling barns, some of them deserted. They 
nestle in rock-ribbed valleys or climb the slopes of 
wind-swept hills, and their boundaries are marked 
by low stone walls built with vast toil. Few young 
men are left on the little farms along the valley. 
The fathers are always working from dawn to dark, 
and when the year ends it shows a scanty livelihood 
in net results, with not much more cash in hand than 
will pay taxes. The mothers achieve miracles of 
household economy, yet the struggle to make both 
ends meet wears them down before their time. 

Living conditions in such communities as this have 
suffered surprisingly few changes during the last 
hundred years. A sprinkling of retired gentlefolk, 
a few merchants whose stores supply the town and 
valley, and the scattered farming community around 
about, comprise a population whose daily round of 
interest largely mirrors those of the days of spinning 
wheels and stage-coaches. For they are still depend- 
ent upon the soil, which has become stale and weary 
with much tilling, and whose small yield no longer 
gives adequate returns for the sweat that It costs. 

It was such towns as this that sent their best blood 
onward and westward to carry on the work they had 
begun. In the village graveyard sleep those men and 
women who tamed the New England wilderness, 
and on the slabs you may read hundreds of names, 
all of Americans of the pioneer stock; names which 
to-day are scattered as far as the Pacific Coast, and 

xii 



Introduction 



which still stand for the qualities of manhood and 
Americanism that have peopled the prairie, the moun- 
tain, the desert and the forest. 

The old home towns of these pioneers and the 
churchyard in which they sleep recall the building 
of a nation in its heroic beginning. Their work is 
done, their towns are little more than memorials of 
what they did, and the spirit that animated them 
has vanished from them, but only to inspire newer 
generations of kindred breed to far greater work of 
the same kind. 

It is true, also, in lesser degree, that in all the 
other country along the Atlantic seaboard the pioneer- 
ing and peopling were long ago accomplished. Even 
the cities of the East find scope for progress chiefly 
in rebuilding upon the foundations laid by others. 
Their people have become the consumers of the re- 
sources of the country to the westward, where the 
great creative and pioneering forces are still active in 
the fresh joy of wresting from the mine, the farm, 
the ranch, the range and the sea their hitherto ungar- 
nered riches. 



xni 



THE GREATERAMERICA 

CHAPTER I 

THE CALL OF THE INLAND SEAS 

On the Great Lakes there are no fleets of tall-sided 
square-riggers waiting for cargoes, no rusty tramps 
in port a month before loafing off across the Seven 
Seas. The traditions of the sea have been flung 
aside. The lines of the vessels of the Atlantic are 
the result of centuries of battling with all weathers, 
and even the sorriest and most unlovely tramp has 
something in her aspect to suggest the noble race of 
deep-water ships from which she sprang. The salty 
harbors are still rich with the romance of the ages, 
and alive with the spirit of adventure and of mystery. 
The voice of the sea sings, " Far Away, Far 
Away," but the cry of the Great Lakes is, " Hurry, 
Oh, Hurry Faster." If the " liner is a lady," the 
cargo boats of the lakes are husky, sweating men 
with their sleeves rolled up, ever in furious toil with 
merciless taskmasters driving them. To be filled to 
the hatches with ore or grain or lumber, to reach 
their destination, unload and hasten back for another 
cargo, this is their business, and for this they are 
built. 

I 



The Greater America 



Along the waterfront of Buffalo I found no forests 
of graceful yards and spars, nor the towering bulk of 
the liners and freighters which overtop the ware- 
houses of the New York docks. Clustered along the 
elevators and ore docks I saw the long, low lake 
carriers, in tonnage surpassing most of the ocean 
cargo steamers. What they looked like was from 
four to six hundred feet of steel trough with a lid on; 
at one end a wheel-house, at the other a smokestack 
and a row of cabins, and between them a clear stretch 
of deck as long as a city block. This is the steamer of 
the Great Lakes, a triumph of American utility and 
adaptability, which can handle more cargo in less 
time than any other transportation device ever made. 

There was a salt-water captain, who, for reasons 
of his own, accepted a berth as first mate in a big 
passenger steamer on the Great Lakes. He was a 
capable seafaring man, but he did not know what 
" hustle" meant until he went aboard at Buffalo. The 
lake skipper to whom he reported for duty remarked 
in the most casual manner: 

" Just give her a coat of paint this morning, and 
if the sun stays hot and she dries in good shape, give 
her a second coat this afternoon." 

The salt-water mate staggered in his tracks and 
made amazed protest. This was a five-thousand-ton 
vessel, and giving her two coats of paint was several 
days' work, by his reckoning. The lake skipper was 
a person of discernment, wherefore he had pity on 

2 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



his new mate and forebore to deal harshly with him, 
explaining, with a tolerant grin : 

" All right. I suppose you'll have to learn to 
move more lively after snoozing around salt water 
all your life. You just pass that order along to the 
bos'n and tell him it's got to be done and then you 
sit up and take notice." 

The bos'n took the order calmly, as If it were in 
the day's work, and by nightfall the big steamer was 
spick and span with two coats of paint from her 
water line to her guard rail. The sailor from deep 
water had learned his first lesson in the ways of the 
Great Lakes during the navigation season, when the 
hard-driven shipping must be forced to do twelve 
months' work in half a year. 

Through the open season the most imposing pro- 
cessions of merchant craft in the world stream up 
and down a thousand miles of inland waterway, carry- 
ing a commerce upon which, in a large measure, hangs 
the Industrial prosperity of this nation. It is a 
magnificent marine which has been created within 
the memory of living men. It is supremely American 
in every way, and most of all in its fashion of solving 
new problems, with no time for, or patience with, the 
old order of things which prevails along the leisurely 
waterfronts of ocean ports. 

It Is Impossible to travel far on the Lakes without 
having an amazing series of contrasts and compari- 
sons fairly flung in one's face by force of what he 

3 



The Greater America 



sees and hears. For example, one of the first cargoes 
of iron ore ever mined in the Lake Superior region 
was trundled aboard a little schooner about fifty years 
ago. Four days were required to put three hundred 
tons aboard her. A week was required to get the 
ore out of her. Two seasons ago the great steel 
steamer Augustus B. IVolvin loaded more than ten 
thousand tons of ore in eighty-nine minutes, or less 
than an hour and a half. And this huge cargo was 
jerked out of her in a little more than four hours. 
Steam and electricity have wrought no more spectac- 
ular miracles than in the handling of cargoes on the 
Great Lakes. 

I soon discovered that the minutes are counted as 
precious in a round trip of two thousand miles. The 
hatches of the freighters we met or passed were 
lifted by steam before the vessels reached their docks, 
and as soon as the hawsers were fast the machinery 
was in motion for transferring cargo. There was 
once a mate who worked out a plan whereby fifteen 
minutes in a journey could be saved, by having the 
hatches off when the boat touched the dock. He 
was promoted for his ingenuity and given a ship of 
his own. In other words, the great railway systems 
have evolved no more economy of system in hand- 
ling freight than this shipping, which laughs at the 
notion that " time and tide wait for no man." 

When I sailed from Buffalo in the summer time our 
steamer was never out of sight of these long, deep- 

4 




■1 ■■riir-i ■■'■', jijggiffmti itbBm 



The vanishiiif[ lake carrier of other days 




The modem f)ii!^htir ; a steel trom^h uith a lid on it 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



laden freighters, which in one season can move thirty- 
five milHon tons of iron ore, besides the flood of grain 
from the western prairies. Last year the lake fleets 
carried nearly fifty million tons of American prod- 
ucts. The sight of this wonderful parade of deep 
vessels, hurrying by night and day from Duluth and 
Chicago and a score of other ports, was enough to 
thrill any American who has been wont to suppose 
that his country owns no merchant marine. The 
Pittsburg Steamship Company controls nearly a 
million tons of shipping, all modern steel steamers 
and barges, compared with which the tonnage of the 
biggest of the ocean companies seems small. 

Your big ocean liner or freighter needs half a 
dozen tugs to swing her and to handle her in the 
cramped confines of harbor and docking slip. 
Because the lake steamers are uncouth and barge- 
like of outline, it must not be presumed that they are 
awkwardly handled. Their skippers send them 
through twisting channels and pinching passages, 
with a skill and ease which would open the eyes 
of a master on the Atlantic. Longer and wider 
and deeper these vessels have been building, until 
now the six-hundred-foot craft has arrived, and the 
limit has not been reached. Such dimensions as these 
put these steel monsters in a class with the largest of 
the Atlantic liners. Yet a crew of twenty-five men 
will handle one of these freighters, and her master 
will carry her through a thousand miles of crowded 

5 



The Greater America 



waters and out of passages not much wider than a 
city street without need of towboat to help him. 

For size and luxury of equipment our passenger 
steamer, the Northwest, would have been called a 
liner on the Atlantic. In the summer twilight we 
came to the St. Clair Flats and the ship canal, which 
unrolled across the lowlands like a silver ribbon. 
Here were hundreds of cottages, whose porches over- 
hung the water, scattered along many little water- 
ways which swarmed with skiffs and launches. It 
was like a huge colony of stranded houseboats, for 
there were no other roads than these water-trails. A 
man from Boston had been gradually shedding his 
reserve as one peels off a coat of sunburn, and this 
summer sight struck him as so immensely picturesque 
and nov^el that he deigned to make comment that was 
genuinely enthusiastic : 

" Do you know, the farther west I go the better 
I like it. Why, I thought the people out here were 
so grossly absorbed in making money that they had 
neither the time nor the talent for enjoying life. 
There must be thousands of them in this American 
Venice. It's most extraordinary for a big steamer to 
be loafing along here among all these cottages. You 
could toss the traditional biscuit from the deck and 
hit a happy householder in the eye almost anywhere." 

The sailing vessel is a thing of the past on the 
Lakes. No more of them are building, and the few 
that survive are aged and rotten, and belong with 

6 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



another age of shipping. Now and then you will 
see a lumber-laden schooner staggering on her course, 
and in the late autumn, when the haste to reap the 
freight harvest becomes a furious rush against the 
coming of the ice, crews risk their lives in manning 
every wornout hulk that will hold together and carry 
canvas for a final race against time. The shipyards 
almost ceased to build the wooden schooner as far 
back as 1873. Most of those which are still in com- 
mission, therefore, date back thirty years and more 
ago. The passing of the sailing vessel, which is still 
in process on the ocean highways, has been accom- 
plished on the Great Lakes. American methods had 
no thought for the romance of sail. And the sea- 
men who have risked their lives in these old wooden 
death-traps thank their stars that the schooner is so 
nearly numbered with the traditions of the Lakes. 

The sight of one of these picturesque relics of the 
inland seas had a certain impressive value as a 
reminder and a contrast in conditions, whose story 
of expansion and change has been wrought with 
magicial swiftness. 

There are gray-haired skippers sailing the Great 
Lakes to-day who can spin yarns of the fur-trading 
era, when the cargoes of merchandise were portaged 
across into Lake Superior and loaded Into little 
schooners which sailed by day and anchored at night 
because there were neither lighthouses nor channel 
marks. They saw the first steamer built to carry ore, 

7 



The Greater America 



and this was no longer ago than 1868. In this ves- 
sel, the /. R. Hackett, the engines were tucked far 
astern, and the deck was lined with hatches for taking 
on cargo with a speed previously undreamed of. 
This was the beginning of that unique style of marine 
architecture, " the steel trough with a lid on it," 
which swarms on the Great Lakes to-day. Then 
came the first iron vessel, and later the beginning of 
steel construction. These early builders and crews 
took chances for the benefit of American commerce. 
Boats of more than three hundred feet in length were 
more or less experimental for several years. One of 
the first of the big steel steamers broke in two in a 
gale off Whitefish Point, and only one of her crew 
got ashore. An old lake captain told me : 

" I remember when the Centurian was loading 
for her first trip at Chicago in 1884. She was so 
big that the newspapers said there wasn't enough 
corn in the harbor to fill her up. She was the largest 
vessel on the Lakes, and she was the sensation of the 
day. At last she was filled and steamed to the west- 
ward, carrying 165,000 bushels of corn. Now they 
carry 450,000 bushels for a cargo, and take it as a 
matter of course. The size of the steamers in future 
will be limited only by the depth of water and the 
length and beam of the locks. When these are 
increased, the shipbuilders will be talking of a seven- 
hundred-foot vessel. When the Canadian lock was 
built, with a width of sixty feet, nobody • dreamed 

8 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



that a boat would ever be built that would be cramped 
in getting through. This year a steamer will be 
launched with a beam of sixty feet, which shuts her 
out of the Canadian lock entirely." 

As the boats increase in size and become more and 
more unwieldy, greater demands are made upon the 
skill and nerve of the navigator. To take a six- 
hundred-foot steamer across the St. Clair Flats and 
through the Detroit River and into St. Mary's 
Canal, even in the best of weather, is a task that 
requires the highest qualities of seamanship and the 
most vigilant care. But to feel his way through the 
Lakes on black nights, steering by range lights and 
sounding and guesswork, always on a lee shore and 
in waters which swarm with shipping as does Broad- 
way with cabs after the theater, is a man's work of a 
big and stirring kind. And in all weathers the call 
of the inland seas, " Hurry, Oh, Hurry Faster," 
drives these skippers ahead until nothing short of a 
smash in the engine room will hold them in port. 

In the autumn the Great Lakes take their cruel toll 
of the ships which risk lives and cargo that the mills 
may have ore and the seaboard may have grain. 
Then the newspapers of Detroit and Buffalo and 
Chicago begin to print such items as this: 

" Fourteen lives are known to have been lost and 
three sturdy vessels sent to the bottom by the storm 
which swept over Lake Superior Friday night and 
Saturday. Seven other men are missing, and It is 

9 



The Gj' eater Ajnerica 



more than probable that when the vessels which 
sought shelter wherever they could find it are able to 
reach port, the tale of losses of ships will be larger 
and the death roll will total more than a score. The 
storm was one of the worst that ever swept over 
the lake. Sailing vessels were at its mercy, barges 
were torn loose from the steamers which towed them, 
and the largest and most modern steel vessels limped 
into port with hatches battered open, cargoes shifted 
and masts gone, to report men swept overboard in 
the struggle with the waves." 

When December comes and the lake fleet Is fight- 
ing to make a last run for it before the ice floes grip 
them, the matter-of-fact reports run like this : 

" Detroit, Dec. 4. — Sheathed in ice, the steel 
steamer Angeline, about whose safety there has been 
much apprehension, arrived at this port for fuel last 
night. After leaving the head of the Lakes with a 
cargo of iron ore for a Lake Erie port, the Angeline 
was struck by a tempest off the Keneewaw Peninsula, 
and for two days had a terrific battle against the 
storm. Once the vessel was near Eagle Harbor, but 
her master, Captain S. A. Lyons, was afraid she 
would be driven on the rocks, so he turned about and 
headed for the open. According to the crew, they 
never saw such high seas on Lake Superior, and their 
dread was that two big waves would lift the vessel 
by the bow and stern and break her in two. They 
gave themselves up for lost through a night and a 

10 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



day. To First Mate McLean fell the duty of watch- 
ing the hatches, to see that none were crushed in. 
With a rope fastened to his waist, and two of the 
crew standing in the shelter of the forward cabin, 
holding the rope, McLean time and again made his 
perilous rounds. Once a wave engulfed him and he 
was washed overboard, but the men at the end of 
the line hauled him back again. Captain Lyons 
remained on the bridge for forty-eight hours, and 
said that the seas ran higher than the vessel's smoke- 
stack." 

From two hundred to four hundred vessels of all 
kinds are wrecked on the Lakes every season, a tragic 
roll of disaster to amaze the landlubber sailing along 
these land-locked stretches in pleasant summer 
weather. Even more impressive is the muster of 
missing ships recorded for these treacherous waters. 
There was the staunch schooner Hume, for instance, 
which cleared from Chicago fifteen years ago. She 
was well-found and ably manned, but neither spar 
nor dead body was ever washed ashore to hint at 
the manner of her fate. In the same year the 
schooner Atlanta vanished in Lake Superior, and her 
end was also utterly mysterious. 

" Then there was the passenger steamer Chkora," 
said my friend the skipper. " She was one of the 
finest and ablest steamers on the Lakes in her time. 
She sailed from St. Joseph, Michigan, in the winter, 
bound for Chicago, crowded with people. That was 

II 



The Greater America 



the last ever seen or heard from her. Not a splinter 
of wreckage was ever found, and she simply blotted 
herself off the shipping list without even a farewell 
whisper. Even worse than this was the loss of the 
big steel steamer fV. H. Gilcher, in 1892. She car- 
ried a crew of sixteen men and foundered somewhere 
in Lake Michigan, without leaving a sign to tell how 
It happened. She was missing, and that's all we 
know. Life on the Lakes isn't all a yachting excur- 
sion, my son." 

A hardy breed of men, doing their duty as they 
find It, the sailors of the Great Lakes are more and 
more In demand to man the new fleets that are build- 
ing every year. While the shipyards of the seacoast 
were walling over the dearth of business, the ship- 
yards of the Lakes booked orders for thirty-one steel 
vessels for the season of 1906, In size from six to 
twelve thousand tons capacity, with a total value of 
fourteen million dollars. While those who prefer to 
search out the dark side of things are finding reasons 
for mourning the fate of their country, here on the 
Great Lakes Is a vast field of organized endeavor 
which is quietly serving the needs of the people from 
the Pacific coast to the Atlantic seaboard; armies of 
hard-working men and mighty squadrons of ships 
hurrying to keep pace with the steadily increasing de- 
mands of commerce, holding railroad rates in check; 
ministering to the needs of many millions, In clean 
and businesslike fashion; moving the raw materials, 

12 




Till' old tC(i\ of luiniiruii^ cariro 





'3^^ 






IV here steam has succeeded hraivn 



mm 




t^ 



fc^ 



^ 



The Call of the Inland Seas 



and making for such a national prosperity as the 
world has never known. 

Without these fleets the grain crop of the West 
would not be worth harvesting, for the railroads 
would be choked in trying to transport half of it. 
Iron and grain — these are the giant factors, looming 
above all others in the commercial and industrial 
power of the country, and they are so largely depend- 
ent upon the traffic of the Great Lakes that this 
shipping is one of the proudest assets of the Ameri- 
can flag. And the men Vv^ho have built it up from 
its crude beginnings, half a century ago, are pretty 
good Americans. 



13 



CHAPTER II 

PAST AND PRESENT AT THE "SOO" 

The modern spirit of the Great Lakes is to be found 
at high tide at the locks of the " Soo," where the pass- 
ing shipping is almost double the volume of that 
which finds its way through the Suez, Kiel and Man- 
chester ship canals combined. Tonnage statistics are 
more or less meaningless to the layman, and he ac- 
cepts the oft-repeated story of the traffic through the 
" Soo " as a fine display of fine big figures which go 
to prove what a great country this is. It is another 
thing, however, to see this shipping go through the 
locks. It is one of the wonders of America as truly 
as Niagara Falls or the Yosemite. And Man, with 
pride in himself and his doings on the face of this 
planet, can find satisfaction in the boastful truth that 
this is a wonder wrought by his own hands. 

For six months of the year an average of a big 
steamer every fifteen minutes of the night and day 
passes through the lock and ship canal which join 
Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Try to imagine, if 
you please, what an imposing spectacle would be 
made by a parade of ocean liners and freighters filing 
up the North or East River of New York, at fifteen- 
minute intervals, twenty-four hours a day, six months 
on end. 

14 



Past arid Present at the " Soo " 

It appealed to me as a sight for mortal man to be 
proud of, and for an American to cheer with his hat 
off. It was clean, honest, splendid achievement, 
wrought out by virtue of brains and pluck and far- 
sightedness. Into the St. Mary's River and canal 
these vessels fairly trod on each other's heels, waiting 
their turn at the lock. In the rapids of the river 
around which the ship canal has been dug were the 
canoes of a handful of Chippewa Indians, and on the 
bank were the tents and wigwams of their camping 
parties. They were living and thinking about as did 
their grandfathers when the white fur traders first 
came among them. And near the modern locks I 
saw the tiny stone lock built by the Northwest Fur 
Company in 1790 to permit its canoes and batteaux 
to make passage between the Lakes without an ardu- 
ous portage. 

Men alive to-day can remember when ten thousand 
Indians from the North came to Mackinac Island 
every year to camp and traffic with the fur traders, 
and when Sault Ste. Marie was a small fur-trading 
post in the heart of the wilderness. Inhabited by 
Canadians, half-breeds and Indians. It was not easy 
for me to realize that the railroad crept into this 
part of the Michigan Peninsula less than twenty 
years ago, and that many people of the town can 
recall living through dreary winters before the whistle 
of the locomotive had broken their long and snow- 
bound Isolation. 

15 



The Greater America 



In those times the " Soo " was closely linked in 
summer by means of the steamers passing daily, but 
winter made their situation as remote as if they dwelt 
in the Hudson's Bay country. From the time the first 
snow fell until the big thaw came in the spring, the 
people seldom saw a strange face, and the carrier 
who brought the mail by a dog sled from the 
nearest railroad point was an important figure in the 
community. 

Traditions of this sort still linger so strongly that 
dog teams are plentiful in the region of the " Soo " 
to-day and are still found so useful that the summer 
tourist is often surprised to see an outfit of this kind 
in the streets at the season when wheels are used 
instead of runners. In winter the mail carrier and 
his dogs are still found in this region, and one of these 
teams plies with the mail pouch between White Fish 
Point and the " Soo," which are sixty-three miles 
apart. 

Twice each week over the frozen surface of Lake 
Superior trails the dog-sled to cover this route, often 
with the thermometer tw^enty degrees below zero. 
Unlike the old Indian mail carriers, he has a sleigh 
large enough to give him a seat, and he runs beside 
his dogs only when it is advisable to keep from freez- 
ing to death. The carrier drives a four-in-hand, 
which he raised from puppies. They are large and 
powerful brutes, half St. Bernard and half Scotch 
collie, the best possible cross for a sled dog. They 

i6 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

are handy also for getting about the country in the 
summer, and one can often see this odd team tearing 
along the streets of the " Soo " at a breakneck gait, 
the dogs hitched to a four-wheeled buggy and driven 
by lines fastened to their collars. 

A veterinary surgeon of the " Soo " has six of the 
finest dogs in the Upper Peninsula, and drives them 
almost daily during the winter months. His trips 
extend as far as St. Ignace Detour, and other points 
within one hundred miles of the " Soo." Last winter 
he made a trip to St. Ignace, stopping over night on 
the way, and covered a distance of sixty-five miles 
in six and one-half hours by actual time on the road. 

Wrapped in a huge fur overcoat, and with a buffalo 
robe tucked around him, this hardy son of Michigan 
starts out with his six dogs in the fiercest storm in the 
coldest weather, and will pass any team of horses on 
the road. In making a long journey, with favorable 
conditions, his dogs will keep up a pace of ten miles 
an hour and wear down any horse. 

The dog is still the most reliable means of trans- 
port through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 
the long winters, and civilization has not been able 
to retire him along with vanished relics of the older 
and ruder times. Until the railroad came the malls 
were supposed to arrive at least once in ten days, but 
sometimes a month elapsed between the visits of the 
sturdy Indian runners, who made their trips of more 
than three hundred miles to Bay City through a 

17 



The Greater America 



wilderness inhabited by wild animals and a few scat- 
tered tribes of Indians. It is only forty years ago since 
there were three white settlements between the " Soo " 
and Bay City. These were old Mackinaw, at the 
very northernmost point of the Lower Peninsula of 
Michigan, and Cheboygan and Alpena, still further 
south along the west shore of Lake Huron. 

One of the most famous of the Indian runners, 
John Boucher, lived until very recently. Sharing the 
honors of his hardy calling was Antoine Paquette, 
who was not a full-blooded Indian, although he had 
the Indian's knowledge of the woods and the trail. 
For twenty-five years these two men made their regu- 
lar trips to and from Bay City through the densest 
growth of pine forest on the continent, and over 
snow which was often six feet deep on the level. 

Their sleds were large enough to carry only the 
mails and a few small packages, and the men usually 
ran the entire distance, keeping pace with their fleet- 
footed dogs. Boucher and Paquette were men of 
tremendous physical vigor, accustomed to the hard- 
ships of frontier life, and both lived into ripe old age. 
They usually drove eight or ten dogs in tandem, and 
the descendants of their sturdy animals are highly 
prized to-day for dog teams in the " Soo " region. 

With them in this mail service were William 
Micron and Edward Vernier, two Frenchmen, who 
completed the list of four carriers needed to keep up 
the mail service in the winter. To some of the old 

i8 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

inhabitants of the " Soo " it seems but a little while 
ago that the arrival of the carrier with letters and 
newspapers from the outside world was an event of 
stirring importance in the life of the village. A 
crowd always gathered at the post-office whenever 
the eager, yelping dogs came tearing down the main 
street at the end of their long journey. Newspapers 
and magazines were passed around from hand to 
hand, and often little groups of men and women 
would gather at the home of some neighbor and listen 
while one of their number read aloud. 

The summer visitor can scarcely realize that this 
modern-looking town is so closely associated with the 
traditions of frontier life. The shores of the river 
and the islands in the upper end of Lake Huron and 
the lower end of Lake Superior are largely peopled 
with Indians and half-breeds, who cling to their tribal 
customs. They bring their canoes loaded with willow- 
ware and other souvenirs for sale, and during the sum- 
mer are a picturesque feature of street life at the 
" Soo." After running across a group of these 
natives, and then sighting two or three dog teams 
hitched to little buggies and wagons, waiting outside 
the stores while their owners were shopping, I was 
vividly Impressed with the curious mixture of the 
past and present which Is to be found in this Michigan 
town. 

The pioneers and frontiersmen of the storied West 
have seen a marvelous epoch of transformation 

19 



The Greater America 



beyond the Mississippi, and yet nowhere did I find 
the drama of American expansion more strikingly 
focused than here at the locks of the " Soo." This 
is the mightiest link between the East and the West, 
between the old and the new, second only in impor- 
tance in the history of American material growth to 
the building of the early transcontinental railroads. 
Only half a century has passed since the opening of 
the first ship canal and locks at the " Soo." At that 
time the project was considered by many wise Ameri- 
cans as extravagant and visionary beyond words. It 
appealed to Henry Clay as on a par with asking 
Congress to make an appropriation for building a 
canal on the moon. Compared with the boldness of 
the men who were behind this project, the construc- 
tion of the Panama Canal is a tame and conservative 
undertaking. 

The first steamer to navigate the waters of Lake 
Superior was the Independence, of less than three 
hundred tons burden. She was laboriously hauled 
across the portage at the " Soo," an undertaking 
which required seven weeks. Previous to this epoch- 
making event a few small schooners were hauled 
across from Lake Huron, by main strength, into 
what was. then an uncharted and unpeopled in- 
land sea. 

As early as 1836, however, or as soon as Michigan 
was admitted to the Union, the governor advocated 
the building of a ship canal by the State in his first 

20 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

message to the new Legislature. A little later Con- 
gress was asked to give a hundred thousand acres of 
land to aid in the work. The effort failed, after many 
members of Congress had echoed the sentiment of 
Henry Clay, that the bill " contemplated a work 
beyond the remotest settlement in the United States." 

The discovery of copper deposits on the shores of 
Lake Superior a few years later gave the project a 
new lease of life. In 1852 Congress granted three- 
quarters of a million acres of land to aid the State of 
Michigan in building the canal. The discussion of 
the project, both in the House and the Senate, was not 
unlike that which has been recently waged over the 
Panama Canal. The type of canal and the size of 
the locks were earnestly fought pro and con. Learned 
engineers finally agreed that a lock two hundred and 
fifty feet long would amply provide for the largest 
vessels possible to conceive as ever navigating those 
waters. 

Opposed to the engineers and the opinion of Con- 
gress w^as a young man, Charles T. Harvey, who was 
visiting the Baptist Mission at Sault Ste. Marie. He 
was a western agent for the Fairbanks Scales Com- 
pany, and neither a trained engineer nor an expert 
on canal building. He was only twenty-one years old 
at the time, but he was an American from his boot 
heels up. When he heard of the passage of the land 
grant by Congress he began to look over the pro- 
jected site of the canal. His brain was big enough 

21 



The Greater America 



to conceive the immense future of this undertaking, 
and he sought and obtained from his employers a fur- 
lough and an expense allowance while he should pro- 
mote the enterprise before the Michigan Legislature. 

Having secured an engineer in New York, young 
Harvey made a private survey of the canal site, and 
became convinced that the lock should be at least a 
hundred feet longer than in the plan adopted by Con- 
gress. His proposed dimensions exceeded those of 
any other lock in the world at that time, but he was 
not in the least abashed. Even the lake navigators 
laughed at the size of his lock. Captain E. D. Ward, 
at that time the most important shipowner on the 
Lakes, opposed the larger lock with tooth and nail, 
on the ground that a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot lock 
would be sufficient for all time, and that more ambi- 
tious plans would result in failure, for lack of finan- 
cial support. 

Young Harvey succeeded in having his plan 
adopted, and then formed a company, backed by the 
Messrs. Fairbanks, which secured the contract for 
constructing the lock. It was a huge undertaking for 
those times. The " Soo " was a wilderness. The 
nearest railroad was several hundred miles away, and 
it took six weeks to receive a reply to a letter sent to 
New York. In order to obtain labor, agents had to 
be sent to New York to board Incoming ships and 
hire parties of immigrants. 

In the winter there were only eight hours of 

22 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

sunlight, and the temperature often stood at thirty- 
five below zero. An epidemic of cholera broke out 
and killed ten per cent, of the workmen, but the work 
was not suspended for a single day. Once two thou- 
sand laborers struck. Young Harvey quietly hid all 
the provisions in the woods, and refused to serve out 
rations until the men had returned to work. They 
surrendered within twenty-four hours. 

The canal and lock were finished within two years, 
at a cost of less than a million dollars. There were 
no cities on the shores of Lake Superior, and no wheat 
belt in the country to the westward. Then came the 
Civil War, which checked the growth of this vast 
region. In 1870, however, the Federal Government 
awoke to the needs of the lake navigation, and found 
that already the three-hundred-and-sixty-foot lock, a 
hundred feet longer than Congress had approved 
twenty years before, was too small for the vessels 
which were steaming east and west. Therefore the 
old lock was ripped out and two greater locks built 
by the Federal Government at a cost of more than 
two million dollars. 

They sufficed no more than fifteen years, although 
the larger of the two was five hundred and fifteen 
feet in length. In 1896 the Poe lock, built by the 
brilliant army engineer of that name, was completed, 
at a cost of four million dollars. It is eight hundred 
feet long, and it was expected that four vessels could 
be locked through at once. It was hardly finished 

23 



The Greater America 



before it was found that not more than one modern 
freighter could be locked through at once. Mean- 
time the Canadian Government had built a lock at 
a cost of two million dollars, but already there is 
much talk of the need of a new and larger lock In 
order adequately to handle the mighty torrent of 
traffic and the Increasing size of the steamers. 

It is bracing to read what General Poe had to say 
about those old locks at the " Soo," in whose con- 
struction there was none of the savor of graft and 
scamp work that hangs about too many public under- 
takings of this day. 

" On the whole the canal was a remarkable work 
for its time and purpose," he wrote. " The construc- 
tion of the locks especially bore evidence of a mas- 
ter's hand In their design and execution, and it was 
no reflection on the engineer in charge that experience 
developed certain objectionable features. The locks 
are now being torn out to make way for new ones, 
and every step in their destruction reveals the excel- 
lence of their workmanship, the honest character of 
the materials employed and the faithful compliance 
with the conditions of the contract under which they 
were built, not merely in the letter, but also in the 
spirit. All honor, then, to every man connected with 
their design and construction. They were long in 
advance of their day, and if commerce had not out- 
grown their dimensions they would have done good 
service for a century. I must confess to a feeling of 

24 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

great regret that it has become necessary to destroy 
these first locks. Inanimate though they were, they 
seemed to appeal to every sentiment of respect. They 
had never failed to respond to any demand within 
their capacity, they had contributed in a higher 
degree than any other one feature to the development 
of the country to the westward of them, and, having 
done such good work, are now to be obliterated in the 
interest of that very commerce they did so much to 
establish. The man who, knowing their history, can 
see them go without compunction is made of other 
stuff than I am, and, if he be an engineer, he has no 
genuine love for his profession nor pride in the 
achievement of those who successfully apply Its teach- 
ings to the best examples of his art." 

Charles Harvey, a vigorous man of eighty, lived 
to attend the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary 
of the building of the first canal and lock, which was 
held at the " Soo " in 1905. Such men as he, who 
have lived to see the wildest dreams come true, who 
have beheld the mighty works of a nation wrought 
from small beginnings, cannot be convinced that the 
country is going to the dogs. 

The Federal Government has let Its ocean mer- 
chant service languish and die, but It has dealt wisely 
and with a generous hand in the development 
of the lake-carrying trade. Fifty million dollars 
have been spent in deepening channels and cutting 
canals. The commerce between Lake Superior and 

25 



The Greater America 



Lake Erie passes through more than forty miles of 
artificial waterway excavated by the government, or 
a greater length of restricted waterway than is 
planned for the Panama Canal. Even fifty millions 
for dredging and excavating ship channels is a small 
toll to pay, when one realizes that the value of the 
iron ore alone which has been carried along this 
water route is more than a billion dollars. 

Bigger things have been done here than piling up 
dollars for individual and national wealth. Stand 
beside the American locks at the " Soo " and watch 
one of the great new freighters steam from the canal 
into the cradled basin of masonry. In length, nine 
of her would measure a mile. She is crammed with 
ten thousand tons of ore from the richest iron mines 
in the world, the Mesabi range, which was discovered 
and made use of only fifteen years ago. The steel 
mills of Pittsburg are waiting for this cargo, which 
was poured into the vessel's hold at the West Superior 
docks like a dusky avalanche. Mined by steam, this 
vast freight of ore is waiting in the lock to be lowered, 
with the ship that contains it, a sheer distance of 
eighteen feet. The brains which planned and the 
cunning hands which made the labor-saving mechan- 
isms by which the steamer ore was mined and the 
steamer loaded are matched by the skill that sets this 
lock at work. 

A half dozen men in blue uniform, scattered along 
the side of the lock, push levers and set engines 

26 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

working. The massive gate closes behind the steamer, 
pushed by hydrauHc power. Powerful pumps begin 
their toil, the steamer begins to drop, and foot by foot 
she is lowered toward the bottom of the lock, until in 
a few minutes she rides almost twenty feet below her 
former level. 

The toil of engines in the big power house, the 
work of a few men in control of them, and all day 
long and through the night the great bulks of these 
cargo-carriers are raised and lowered with no more 
fuss and flurry than the operation of an elevator in 
an office building. Once through the lock, the 
steamer moves on her course to her distant dock, 
there to be unloaded by another handful of quiet, 
self-reliant men manipulating a few wheels and levers 
which set to work the strength of thousands of men 
focused in steam and electric power. 

On a majestic scale, in every link of this industrial 
chain, American invention and talent for organization 
have worked to reduce the cost of the products of 
the mine and the farm and the forest, benefiting both 
the producer and the consumer. Brains have almost 
eliminated brawn. When ten thousand tons of ore 
have been carried from the mines of Lake Superior 
to the mills of the Pittsburg district, no more than 
fifty men have handled them through all stages of 
transportation. Forty years ago the freight rate from 
Marquette to Ohio ports was from three to six dollars 
a ton. To-day it averages seventy-five cents a ton. 

27 



The Greater America 



With such a marvelous development of wealth 
and commerce in a lifetime as the Great Lakes have 
displayed, it is small wonder that Francis H. Clergue 
thought that nothing was Impossible when he planned 
his empire of Industry at the " Soo," He failed 
because his ideas were bigger than his ability to exe- 
cute them at the time, but he was not a visionary, and 
his dreams will all come true within the next 
generation. 

There Is something inspiring even In such a collapse 
as overtook him. He had the spirit of the men who 
have done the biggest things for American material 
success, but, In the plain Anglo-Saxon, he " bit off 
more than he could chew." Like the young Harvey 
who built the first canal and lock, he was stirred by 
the vast possibilities of the " Soo." He also was a 
young man, less than thirty-five, when he was sent 
West to seek a new water-power that might be turned 
to profit. The " Soo " bewitched him, with Its fall 
of eighteen feet In the St. Mary's River between the 
two lakes. 

Clergue obtained a Canadian charter for a water- 
power canal and constructed It. Then he found him- 
self with twenty thousand horse power on his hands 
and no purchaser In sight, for the " hard times " of 
the early nineties frightened capital away from such 
pioneering enterprises as this; therefore he decided 
to use It himself. He knew a good deal about paper 
mills because he had worked In them In Maine. 

28 



Past and Present at the " Soo " 

There was no end of low-priced timber for pulp in 
the forests around the " Soo." 

He built a pulp mill, one of the largest in the 
country, running night and day by water-power. He 
was no more than fairly started in the work of trans- 
forming the sleepy old town at the " Soo." A little 
later a second power canal was built, on the Michigan 
side, to develop forty thousand horse power. Then 
Clergue planned a railroad, the Algoma Central, to 
connect with the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles 
to the northward, and thence to Hudson's Bay, five 
hundred miles away. He received the promise of 
Canadian land grants of nearly four million acres, 
including the mineral and timber rights. Having 
acquired rich iron mines, he built a blast furnace, and 
then a steel plant and a rail mill. He rolled the first 
rail in Canada, made from Canada pig Iron, smelted 
from Ontario ore. These works were nowhere sur- 
passed for completeness of equipment. Meanwhile 
Clergue was building sawmills and developing more 
mining properties, constructing an electric-light plant 
for the town of Sault Ste. Marie, building street-car 
systems, and planning new Industries on every hand. 

He found the " Soo " a primitive settlement, no 
more than a supply station for passing ships. Within 
eight years he had built not only his paper and Iron 
and steel and lumber mills, but also car shops, ferry 
and traction lines, freight and passenger steamers, 
and a railroad, In operation for a hundred miles. He 

29 



The Greater America 



agreed to settle annually a thousand immigrants on 
his land grants in the Canadian wilderness, and two 
thousand men were chopping wood for him in his 
forests. The cash investment in the Clergue enter- 
prises was twenty-five million dollars. 

One industry was to feed another, and the whole 
was to be correlated as a great interdependent indus- 
trial community. The splendid scheme was extrava- 
gantly executed, and disaster came before all the 
plants could be operated as a unit. The dazzling 
fabric collapsed because no more cash could be ob- 
tained to round out the undertaking. In the water- 
power and in the massively constructed buildings 
which await another master spirit to set them hum- 
ming with industry, the owners have an asset that 
must some day realize all the dreams of Its promoter, 
the young man from Maine who began with an idea 
and raised twenty-five million dollars In the struggle 
to make It come true. 

During his leadership Clergue resided in the old 
blockhouse built by the Hudson's Bay Company. 
There could be no more dramatic contrast, even in 
fiction, than between this rugged old blockhouse, with 
the men who built It and lived In It, and the modern 
captain of Industry who wove within these walls the 
projects that should set a thousand men at work to 
build and to produce, where one Indian fur trapper 
roamed no more than half a century ago. With the 
vein of sentiment which led him to use the old 

30 



Past and Present at the " Soo" 

blockhouse for his living quarters, Clergue restored 
the primitive lock made by the fur traders, and it is 
preserved on the Company's grounds as a memorial 
of obliterated conditions on the northern American 
frontier. 



31 



CHAPTER III 

THE STORY OF A COPPER MINE 

As I neared the Michigan copper country, after the 
voyage through the Lakes, there was httle to suggest 
that devastation of God's green landscape which else- 
where goes hand in hand with mining operations. 
Back of the city of Houghton rose a range of billow- 
ing hills, wooded with a second growth of timber. 
Against the skyline loomed a red shaft-house or two, 
looking not wholly unlike grain elevators. And 
along the crest of the hill trailed a long train of ore- 
laden cars like a monstrous snake. The scattered 
towns through which the trolley took me on the way 
to Calumet had little of that ugliness and squalor 
of most mining communities, nor was the air heavy 
with smoke and foul with vapors. The clean breeze 
swept over fields and patches of woodland, and I per- 
ceived that this was a far more attractive landscape 
than that which is left in the wake of the coal or iron 
miner. In fact, the tall red shaft-houses which dotted 
the fields were almost the only signs of the prodigious 
activity that toiled underground by night and day. 

Scattered over this rolling country were a dozen 
different towns, all part of one vast mining camp, 
Hecla, and Calumet, Red Jacket, Blue Jacket, Yellow 

32 




■ft, 
•ft. 







e^ 



Tlie Story of a Copper Mine 

Jacket, Wolverine, Tamarack, Osceola and Laurlum. 
More than forty thousand people were living in these 
towns and depending on copper for their bread. Five 
thousand men toiled for the Calumet and Hecla 
Company, and more than half of this army was 
employed in the underground workings. There were 
more miles of streets beneath the surface than in the 
towns on top. Two hundred miles of shafts, drifts 
and cross-cuts honeycombed the earth as far down as 
a mile from the surface. To support this amazing 
system of underground highways, this company was 
using thirty million feet of timber every year. It 
was clearing the country of timber for five hundred 
miles and was eating up the northwestern forests 
faster than all the lumbering interests. The company 
has its own logging crews and mills and its great 
forests. Its lumbering activity is a huge industry in 
itself. 

Little more than a half century has passed since 
copper was the lure that led men to explore a wilder- 
ness as near home as the upper peninsula of Michigan, 
and to reveal a magnificent storehouse of treasure on 
the shores of Lake Superior. Late into the last cen- 
tury that region was considered so hopeless a wilder- 
ness, fit only for the Indian, the fur trader and the 
trapper, that Michigan made vehement protest 
against its inclusion within her borders, and almost 
put the matter to a clash of arms with the State forces 
of Ohio. The pioneer settlers of what was then the 

33 



The Greater America 



remote West were not looking for iron or copper. 
They had neither the means for transportation nor 
manufacture, and they pressed on past the Lake 
Superior country with an indifference that seems 
amazing in the light of after events. 

It had been known for centuries that this region 
was rich in minerals. The hardy Jesuits, who were 
as keen prospectors after natural resources as after 
aboriginal souls, found copper by the shore of the 
inland sea that was later called Lake Superior. And 
as early as 1640 a history of America written in 
French declared that " there are in this region mines 
of copper, tin, antimony and lead." The Indians of 
that time were mining copper in crude fashion, but 
even they were not the pioneer discoverers. Stone 
hammers were found beside ancient workings whose 
mounds of earth were topped by trees of primeval 
growth. More remarkable than this, hewn wooden 
props, not wholly decayed, were found supporting 
masses of copper mined in a prehistoric age. The 
Mound Builders, or a race akin to them, had discov- 
ered and exploited, without the aid of a promotion 
syndicate or an issue of watered stock, the earliest 
American copper mines. 

A hundred and forty years ago an adventurous 
Englishman, Captain Jonathan Carver, voyaged 
Lake Superior and went home to form a company for 
developing the mineral wealth of that trackless terri- 
tory. English Investors were more timid then than 

34 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

now about American securities, and Captain Carver, 
who deserved a better fortune for his daring enter- 
prise, saw his schemes go ghmmering. 

It was left for a young American geologist, Doug- 
las Houghton, to explore this peninsula and awaken 
his countrymen to the riches that lay at their hand. 
He perished in a storm on Lake Superior at the age 
of thirty-six, but his brief career wrought a mighty 
work for his nation. In a birch-bark canoe he skirted 
the south shore of Lake Superior for voyage after 
voyage, making observations and gathering data 
with the eye of a practical scientist and the imagina- 
tion of a tamer of wilderness places. In 1841 he 
submitted a report to the State government of Michi- 
gan, in whose employ he was, and there began a rush 
of treasure-seekers into a country far more inaccessi- 
ble than the Klondike of to-day. 

Copper was the prize sought by thousands of pros- 
pectors, most of whom struggled with the severest 
hardships, only to abandon their claims in disgust 
and return to civilization empty-handed. But a begin- 
ning had been made, and American enterprise, no 
longer content to let England enjoy what was almost 
a monopoly of the copper production of the world, 
buckled down to the task of opening its own mines. 

This was long before the discovery of the great 
deposits of Montana, which have yielded fabulous 
wealth for the copper kings of Butte and Anaconda 
and Helena. Nor has the Lake Superior region been 

35 



The Greater America 



besmirched by such a colossal war of greed as has 
befouled Montana politics and made its copper mines 
a by-word for stock jobbery and a gorgeous variety 
of corruption. By contrast, it is as wholesome and 
clean a story of American commercial success as one 
can find, this development of the copper resources 
of the Lake Superior region, as typified in the famous 
Calumet and Hecla mine. 

Copper is a sturdy king among metals to-day. As 
the Age of Steel has followed the Age of Iron, so 
the succeeding industrial epoch is to be the Age of 
Electricity, whose foundation Is copper. Already 
this metal adds five hundred million dollars each year 
to the wealth of the world, and its reign is no more 
than in its sturdy youth. Here, for example, is this 
Calumet and Hecla property, which has never gained 
that kind of spectacular notoriety that is given a 
famous gold mine. Yet the product of this one 
group of shafts has paid more dividends than have 
been reaped by any other mining corporation in the 
world. 

Almost one hundred million dollars have been paid 
to the lucky stockholders in the last thirty-five years, 
on a total capitalization of only two and a half mil- 
lions. In one recent period of five years the mine paid 
twenty-seven million dollars in dividends, or more 
than double its capital stock each year. Small won- 
der that the group of conservative Boston men who 
direct this magnificent bonanza have fought shy of 

36 



The Story of a Copper 3Iine 

such top-heavy and inflated combinations as " Amal- 
gamated Copper." 

The Calumet and Hecla mines were discovered 
forty years ago. Tradition has it that an astute and 
industrious pig, while rooting amid the forests a few 
miles back from Lake Superior, turned up the chunk 
of copper which unearthed this hidden mine. The 
pig story is plausil>le enough and has no lack of his- 
torical confirmation from various other sources. In 
fact, it is a sort of historical mode or fashion for 
famous mines to have been discovered by an inquisi- 
tive pig or a wandering burro with an agile hoof. 
Somewhere in Mexico there is a silver pig with jew- 
eled eyes, holding a place of honor in a cathedral, in 
memory of the location of a fine silver mine by one 
of these porcupine prospectors. In crediting a pig 
with the discovery of Calumet and Hecla the tradi- 
tions have been faithfully observed. 

The Calumet and Hecla of to-day is worth a visit 
as an impressive object lesson of how well a great cor- 
poration can look after its properties and employees 
without impairing its dividends. It can be said of 
certain other American corporations that their prop- 
erties were discovered by men and have been managed 
by pigs ever since. The Calumet and Hecla has 
reversed this procedure. 

This upper corner of the staunch American State 
of Michigan is a show ground of the people of thirty 
nations at work, side by side, in peace and comfort. 

37 



The Greater America 



The native-born is outnumbered on a basis of one 
American to a hundred foreigners. The Cornwall 
and Finnish miners lead in numbers, followed by the 
Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans, Polish, French, Dan- 
ish, Norwegians, Swedish, Russians, Hollanders, 
Greek, Swiss, Austrians, Belgians, negroes, Slavs, 
Bohemians, with a sprinkling above ground of Chi- 
nese, Arabians, Persians, and one family of Lap- 
landers. 

This is an amazing medley of races, in which the 
American seems fairly lonesome. Among the local 
newspapers are the Weekly Glasnik, the Daily Paiva- 
lehti, The American Soiimetar, and La SentinelU. 
Even the leading American newspaper publishes for 
the benefit of its subscribers a column in the dialect of 
Cornwall, which includes such poetic gems as this : 

" Wheal Damsel es a fitty mine, 
Next door to Wheal Kiser; 
Ef the sun forgot to shine 
We should never miss her; 
Give us candle, clay and cap, 
We can see where we must stap, 
Ef to work we do incline, 
Down to Old Wheal Damsel. 

Chorus : 



" Pay-day comes on Saturday, 
Restin' time on Sunday, 
38 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

Shall we work or shall we play 
'Pon Maze Monday ?* 

" Ef not chucked with powder smawk 
And the smeel of dyneemite, 
'Tes so aisy straight to walk 
As for dogs to bark and bite; 
But touch pipe in kiddlywink 
Weth some fourp'nny for to drink, 
Reason 'pon its throne will rock, 
Forgettin' Old Wheal Damsel. 
Oh, there's trouble in the glass, 
Wuss than boyer-baiten, 
When the thursty time do pass, 
Peggy's tongue es waiten." 

The men from Cornwall chuckle over such bits of 
the home tongue as this, but need no " Maze Mon- 
day " to recover from the effects of visiting the 
saloons of Calumet or Red Jacket. In fact, this 
polyglot community Is so singularly law abiding that 
the horde of sociologists that Is rampant In the land 
should organize a personally conducted tour to this 
favored community. There Is no municipal police 
force In the district. The towns are under the su- 
pervision of a few constables and watchmen, after 
the manner of one of the old-fashioned New Eng- 
land village communities. The Calumet and Hecla 

*In the old days Cornish miners used to require the Monday after 
pay-day to get over the effects of visiting the kiddlywink, or village 
public-house — hence the name of "Maze Monday." 

39 



The Greater America 



Company maintains a metropolitan fire department of 
its own and carries its own insurance. This relieves 
the town from the burden of fire protection. 

In the town of Calumet two-thirds of the public 
revenue is received from saloon license fees, and yet 
drunkenness seldom becomes disorderly. This town 
has an income of sixty thousand dollars a year from 
fees and taxes, and the ofllicials have on their hands 
the problem of spending a handsome surplus for the 
benefit of their community. They are using It In 
paving streets and for other permanent improvements 
Instead of in supporting a police force and paying 
salaries to a lot of political barnacles. 

This Calumet, a large and thriving town composed 
of men of more than a score of different nations, is so 
much more advanced than most American cities that 
it has a municipal theater, built by the public funds 
at a cost of a hundred thousand dollars. This hand- 
some stone playhouse Is leased to a manager who pays 
the town four per cent, interest on Its Investment, and 
who Is held responsible for the conduct of the enter- 
prise on a popular and efficient basis. 

Here Is a large community peopled by foreigners 
who are alleged to be pouring into this counti-y faster 
than we can absorb them. They are called a menace 
to our institutions, and agitators declare that Ameri- 
canism will be submerged by this swelling tide. The 
Calumet and Hecla Company has worked out Its own 
solution of the immigration problem. Its miners and 

40 



The Story of a Coi)per Mine 

their families are treated as human beings, and they 
are good enough Americans to put to shame the spirits 
and achievements of many a community which brags 
of its native stock. This company has no complaint 
to make on the score of lack of efficiency among its 
employees, because they are given a fair show to live 
decently and make their communities clean and pros- 
perous. It has gone about the business of assimi- 
lating a foreign population by methods which do not 
seem to have occurred to the Chicago packers. 

The company owns about twelve hundred dwelling 
houses in the towns around its mines. They are 
rented to Its employees at an average charge of six 
per cent, on the actual cost of the building, plus the 
cost of maintenance. The miners pay from six to 
eight dollars In rent for the small frame houses, not 
tenements, with a patch of ground big enough for a 
kitchen garden. Wages are never reduced to fatten 
dividends. If It becomes necessary to curtail the 
output, a certain number of men are laid off for a 
time, but wages are not cut. And wages have been 
good enough to permit one thousand of these miners 
to purchase outright from the company their own 
homes, which is a pretty solid argument In Itself. 

On the company's lands there are about thirty 
churches, occupied by more than a dozen denomina- 
tions. The company gave the sites for all these 
churches, and in many cases has furnished cash aid 
toward the erection and maintenance funds, without 

41 



The Greater America 



regard to creed. There are eight school-houses on 
the Calumet and Hecla property, most of which were 
built by the corporation. In these school-houses the 
children of Finns and Welsh and Slavs and Germans, 
along with the children of twenty other nationalities, 
are fused as In a melting pot to become good Ameri- 
cans of the second generation, speaking English as 
their common tongue, and saluting the Stars and 
Stripes above their buildings. 

A handsome stone library was built by the com- 
pany without the aid of Andrew Carnegie, for it has 
been the policy here to return some of the profits in 
building institutions to better the condition of the 
toilers who helped to make the wealth, instead of 
scattering these profits elsewhere. This free library 
contains more than sixteen thousand volumes in a 
score of languages, and it is used and enjoyed by the 
men and women of all the races that live in this 
region. There is a fine stone clubhouse, built for the 
miners by their employers, containing bathrooms, 
bowling-alleys, etc. There Is also at Lake Linden, 
where the stamp mills and smelters are situated, a 
combination library and clubhouse. 

The company maintains for Its people a hospital 
that Is widely noted for the completeness of Its surgi- 
cal and laboratory apparatus. A dozen physicians of 
the hospital staff are ready to respond to the call of 
any miner or his family needing their services. In 
1877 a miners' benefit fund was founded by the 

42 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

company, and its management was turned over to a 
board of directors chosen by the workmen. This 
fund pays death and disability benefits, and has dis- 
bursed an immense sum since its beginning, every 
dollar of which has gone to the sick or injured, or to 
families who have lost their bread-winners by acci- 
dent or disease. 

Whenever a surplus has accumulated in this fund, 
it has been invested in the shares of the company, 
bought in the open market, and this kind of invest- 
ment has been notably profitable. In one recent year 
the outlay in benefits from this fund was sixty-five 
thousand dollars, and the value of the fund, or reserve 
and surplus in hand, was a hundred and thirty-six 
thousand dollars. To maintain this fund every 
employee of the company pays from his wages fifty 
cents a month. And for every fifty cents paid in by 
the miner the company adds to the fund a half dollar 
from its own pocket. It is, therefore, a combined 
charity, philanthropy and assessment organization, 
which has acted as a splendid factor in promoting 
contentment and keeping at arm's length the suffering 
of helpless poverty. 

Copper mining is clean work, as mining goes, and 
the men behind this gigantic enterprise have tried to 
make their miners feel that thrift and comfort can be 
theirs for a little effort. The prudent Finnish and 
English miners save their wages, with an eye to the 
future. As soon as they have funds ahead they begin 

43 



The Greater America 



to look up cheap farming and timber tracts for settle- 
ment. Then they move their families out of the cop- 
per country, and swing the ax instead of the pick, 
and get their little farms under way. Thus they help 
to build up the new country of northern Michigan, 
and to found American families close to the soil 
whence the strength of the nation has come. 

But as long as they dwell within the shadows of 
the tall, red shaft-houses of Calumet and Hecla, they 
think and talk little else besides copper. They keep in 
touch with the copper mines and markets of the world, 
from Montana to Australia, and from the Rio Tinto, 
in Spain, to the deep pits of Cornwall. One of these 
thrifty towns strikes the stranger as too big for its 
population. There are few men in the streets through 
the daylight hours, and the long blocks of stores 
seem deserted. Here is a world in which half 
of the men are underground and a good share of the 
remainder asleep at home, wherefore you can see the 
whole town above ground and in the streets only on 
Sunday. 

These miners go deep after copper. If you go to 
the famous Red Jacket shaft, for instance, you find 
the most powerful hoisting machinery in the world, 
huge engines of as much as eight thousand horse- 
power, which reel and unreel drums of wire cable 
that wind down a straight mile below the surface. 
These engines hoist ten-ton cars of ore one mile at 
the rate of forty miles an hour, or from the bottom 

44 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

to the top of this stupendous hole in the ground in 
ninety seconds. 

This is the deepest mining shaft in the world. 
Apart from this fact, perhaps the most interesting 
feature of the Red Jacket shaft is in the theory that 
it is possible to detect the effect of the earth's revolu- 
tion in a hole as deep as this. No less an authority 
than President McNair of the Michigan College of 
Mines has explained the belief that nothing dropped 
in this deepest of mining shafts can ever reach bottom 
without colliding with the east side of the shaft, 

'' This is due to the motion of the earth," said he. 
" The article dropped, no matter what its shape or 
size may be, will invariably be found clinging to the 
east side of the shaft. One day a monkey-wrench 
was dropped by a miner, but it failed to reach the 
bottom, and was found lodged against the east side 
of the shaft several hundred feet down. We decide 
that to make a proper test of the theory it would be 
worth while to experiment with a small, heavy, spheri- 
cal body. So we suspended a marble tied with a 
thread about twelve feet below the mouth of the 
shaft We then burned the thread with a lighted 
match in order not to disturb the exact fall of the 
marble. About five hundred feet down it brought 
up against the east side of the shaft. When miners 
have fallen down the shaft the result has been similar. 
Their bodies, badly torn, have been found lodged 
against the east side of the shaft. A carload of 

45 



The Greater America 



rock was dumped down the deepest mining shaft in 
South Africa, but not a particle of it reached the 
bottom." 

Professor McNair has said also that the limit of 
depth to which mines can be driven and worked has 
not yet been reached. The temperature at the bottom 
of Red Jacket was almost ninety degrees when it 
was first opened, but this has been reduced by ventila- 
tion to between seventy and eighty degrees, at which 
miners work in comparative comfort. In the opinion 
of Professor McNair, the Red Jacket shaft will sup- 
ply the most valuable data ever gathered relating to 
the thickness and densities of the earth's crust. " The 
deep shafts in other parts of the world begin at an 
altitude and end at, or above, sea level," said he, 
" whereas this shaft pierces the earth's crust deeper 
and farther below the ocean level than any other hole 
in existence. Scientific investigations have been in 
progress for some time, and we hope to make public 
some interesting results." 

It is a fascinating hole in the ground, simply 
because of its amazing depth, but it is not an easy 
hole to enter if you are not personally vouched for 
by President Agassiz of the Calumet and Hecla Com- 
pany. Strangers are not admitted, and the reason is 
startling. Underground fires have imperiled this 
vast property more than once, and it is believed that 
they were of incendiary origin. Whether or not rival 
copper companies are suspected of such a piratical 

46 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

method of curtailing the supply of metal is something 
you must guess for yourself. 

This is the greatest fire risk in the world, and It 
is protected by a water main and telephone system 
underground, pumping stations and electric alarm 
systems. The company has lost several million dol- 
lars in fire, however, and is cautious to the point of 
acute suspicion. The elaborate system of fire protec- 
tion was severely tested in 1890, when an alarm was 
turned in on Sunday night. There were only a few 
employees in the workings, and the fire had gained 
frightful headway before it was discovered. Then 
the burning area of the mine was shut off by closing 
a system of fireproof doors. The surface opening 
was sealed by covering the mouths of the shafts with 
heavy timbers, and tamping all the crevices with 
earth. Wherever gas escaped more earth was tamped 
and made solid with water. In three weeks the fire 
was smothered in this fashion, and other shafts were 
kept working without interruption. Fires in deep 
mines have burned for years, and the masterful sys- 
tem by which the Calumet and Hecla has been able 
to protect its property is In keeping with Its resource- 
ful enterprises In other directions. The layman Is 
apt to wonder how a mine can be swept by a destruc- 
tive fire. But In these vast labyrinths which Calumet 
and Hecla has driven beneath the earth there Is more 
timber than goes Into the buildings of many a preten- 
tious and prosperous city. And If this mine were 

47 



The Greater America 



burned out there would be a direct loss of scores of 
millions of dollars and an indirect loss of hundreds 
of millions. 

There is an impressive industrial community above 
ground In such an undertaking as this. There are 
sawmills and carpenter shops, smithies greater than 
can be found anywhere else except in the works of 
the most extensive manufacturers of machinery, with 
a hundred busy blacksmiths. Fifty tons of steel drill 
have to be sharpened every day, and an army of boys 
is needed to lug them between the shops and the 
mines. Warehouses and supply stations, a private 
railroad operating twenty miles of main track, a fleet 
of steamships, these and many other parts of this 
huge Industrial organization are kept In motion by 
the copper ore that Is hoisted from thousands of feet 
below the surface. 

The active ruler of this lusty kingdom is James Mc- 
Naughton, superintendent of the Calumet and Hecla 
mine. Five thousand men take orders from him, and 
he pays them six million dollars a year In wages. His 
story is one of those miracles that happen in this 
" land of opportunity." He was born In Ontario 
forty years ago, and left home to " hustle " for him- 
self. At twelve years of age he was a water-boy on 
the Calumet and Hecla docks on the lake front. 
Between working hours he managed to peg away at 
school until he was fourteen. Then he became a 
switch-tender, and a year later was a stationary 

48 



The Story of a Copper 3Iine 

engineer, earning two dollars a day, and saving half 
of it toward an education. 

At nineteen he entered Oberlin College, and began 
to think of becoming a mining engineer. By work- 
ing during vacation he was able to take a two years' 
course at the University of Michigan. After gradu- 
ation he obtained a position in the Boston offices of 
the Calumet and Hecla Company. From there he 
took a berth as a mining engineer at Iron Mountain, 
Michigan. At last, returning to the Calumet and 
Hecla, he fought his way to the top and was made 
superintendent five years ago. 

Now mark you what the personal equation of 
one strong and able man can accomplish as soon as it 
find its field for action. Without reducing wages, 
or overworking his men, or curtailing any of the com- 
pany's many philanthropic enterprises, McNaughton 
began to tighten up the screws for a higher efficiency. 
He has saved millions of dollars for his shareholders, 
and what his ability has amounted to may be per- 
ceived in the statement that he has cut the cost of 
milling the ore almost in half. 

There is a somewhat prevalent impression that 
captains of industry are overpaid, that the army of 
toilers pay unfair tribute to those who control their 
labor. I do not know what salary the Calumet and 
Hecla Company pays James McNaughton, yet if 
he were given a hundred thousand dollars a year, not 
a miner in Calumet could object with fairness. For 

49 



The Greater America 



every one of them Is getting as good wages as ever, 
and is as generously treated by his employers, nor 
have any miners been deprived of their jobs. But be- 
cause he has the brains and the backbone, McNaugh- 
ton is able to create millions of dollars in industrial 
wealth with exactly the same tools which could not 
create this additional wealth in less competent hands. 

The Michigan copper miner earns from sixty to 
seventy-five dollars a month, with steady employment 
the year around. With this he is able to have a home 
and pay his bills, to educate his children and protect 
his family if he is overtaken by sickness or death. Nor 
is he of a different class from the average immigrant 
who seeks this land from all quarters of Europe. The 
difference is in the environment and in the way he is 
handled and taught after he lands. His employers 
believe that he has something more due him than 
the right to exist and toil. They give him a chance 
to live like a man and he looks around him and sees 
a thousand homes owned outright by miners who 
began just as he is beginning, as strangers in a strange 
land, who have only their labor to sell. There are 
no labor unions among the miners of the Calumet 
region. The miners say they do not need them. 
They are satisfied with their wages and their living 
conditions, and they prefer to work the whole year 
through to being on strike for higher wages. 

While there is not much of the picturesque in this 
mining region, it is a cheering American example of 

50 




^ 






The Story of a Copper Miiie 



what can be done with the problem of foreign immi- 
gration. Nor could this problem be more varied 
and vexatious than amid so great an assortment 
of tongues, customs and racial prejudices. The Calu- 
met and Hecla Company appears to have gone a long 
way toward a solution by sticking to certain old- 
fashioned doctrines of fair play and honest apprecia- 
tion of the bonds between capital and labor. 

If you would see copper transformed from a dull 
and unlovely ore into something really beautiful, 
then follow it from the mine to the smelter. My 
pilgrimage to the Michigan copper country ended 
with a visit to a smelter near the town of Houghton, 
where the long ore-trains come trailing over the hills 
from the stamp mills which grind the fragments of 
ore to a powder that looks like coarse brown sugar. 
From the cars it is dumped into elevated bins, which 
shoot it into other cars that run across a trestle to the 
great furnaces, whose heat is twenty-three hundred 
degrees. 

Here the ore must be purified as it melts, and the 
refiner dumps cord-wood into the glowing cauldron, 
and blows air through the mass to clean away the 
dross. At one end of the furnace is a trough, and, at 
the proper time, a gate is opened and the liquid cop- 
per floods out In a dazzling stream of gold. With 
a wonderful play of colored flames, of blue and 
crimson and violet, the liquid travels onward Into 
Ingot molds, which are set around the edge of a huge 

51 



The Greater America 



wheel. On the hub of this wheel sits a man who 
rides this chariot of fire with amazing skill and indif- 
ference to his incandescent surroundings. 

As the slowly revolving wheel brings one set of 
molds opposite the copper ladle, he fills them and 
they move on while others take their places. By the 
opposite rim of the wheel is another workman, who 
pries the cooling ingots from their molds as they pass 
him. This is pure, commercial copper, made while 
you wait, each ingot weighing forty-six pounds and 
worth six dollars in the metal market. Their color 
is bright red, shading off into tints of steel blue. 

They are dumped into running water to cool off, 
and a most ingenious machine with steel fingers picks 
them up and lugs them up a dripping incline, over 
which they clatter and slide down on a platform, ready 
for the warehouse. Two strong men whose hands 
are protected by cloth pads pick them up and swing 
them on to cars until 30,000 pounds make the load. 
A squat electric locomotive, not as tall as the man 
who operates it, waits until a train of these cars is 
ready. Then it rattles away to the shed without fuss 
or effort. 

Upon each of these little cars is piled $4,500 worth 
of copper which has been transformed from the ore 
into the shining ingots while you have paused for a 
few minutes to watch the process. So swiftly wrought 
is this miracle, so deftly easy looks the process by 
which the turn of a wheel seems to create wealth 

52 



The Story of a Copper Mine 

before your eyes, that you are inclined to number 
copper among the precious metals. 

No more than six or seven men have been busied 
in this whole operation, yet in one good working day 
they will turn out two hundred thousand pounds of 
copper ingots, which are worth thirty thousand dol- 
lars. This crew once made a world's record of a 
week's production of more than a million pounds of 
copper, worth one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. 
The daily charge of two hundred thousand pounds 
is smelted in five or six hours. It is a most fascinat- 
ing mining exhibit, without fuss, dirt or discomfort, 
with no uproar and no foul air. 

After seeing the mining region beyond the hills, 
and watching the smelting, you begin to think that 
a copper mine may be as worth while owning as a 
gold mine in Alaska. But while the profits of the 
Calumet and Hecla mine are so dazzling and envi- 
able, nobody will begrudge them as long as these 
communities of mining folk up among the woods and 
fields of Michigan are being made good Americans 
in the smelter of an honest corporation's sense of 
responsibility for the thousands of men, women and 
children whom wealth and power have committed 
to its keeping. 



53 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CONFUSION OF A PROPHET 

A FEW years ago the Board of Trade of Duluth, with 
the spirit of the true Western " booster," printed in 
pamphlet form that speech by Proctor Knott which 
immortalized the " Zenith City of the Unsalted 
Seas." Through the original text were scattered up- 
to-date comments which show how poor a prophet a 
senatorial orator could be only thirty-five years ago. 
As throwing light across the path of progress of 
this city at the head of the Great Lakes, the follow- 
ing oratorical extracts and the present-day reflections 
of the Board of Trade, inserted in italics, are as 
effective as pages of description of this typical western 
city of the twentieth century. 

" Years ago," sonorously proclaimed Proctor 
Knott, " when I first heard that there was some- 
where in the vast terra incognita, somewhere in the 
bleak regions of the Northwest, a stream of water 
known to the nomadic inhabitants as the river St. 
Croix, I became satisfied that the construction of a 
railroad from the raging torrent [water-power of 
St. Louis River adjoining Duluth, 65,000 horse 
power] to some point in the civilized world was essen- 
tial to the happiness and prosperity of the Ameri- 
can people, if not absolutely indispensable to the 

54 



The Confusion of a Prophet 



perpetuity of Republican institutions on this continent. 
(Great laughter.) I felt instinctively that the 
boundless resources of that prolific region of sand 
and pine shrubbery would never be fully developed 
without a railroad constructed and equipped at the 
expense of the government, and perhaps not then. 
(Laughter.) \_N umber of lines of railroads entering 
Diiluth, eleven-l 

". . . Now, sir, who, after listening to this 
emphatic and unequivocal testimony of intelligent, 
competent and able-bodied witnesses, will doubt 
(laughter), who, that is not as incredulous as St. 
Thomas himself, will doubt for a moment that the 
Goshen of America will be found in the valleys and 
upon the pine-clad hills of the St. Croix? Who will 
have the hardihood to rise in his seat on this floor 
and assert that, excepting the pine bushes, the entire 
region would not produce enough vegetation in ten 
years to fatten a grasshopper? (Great laughter.) 
[Estimated amount of standing pine timber tributary 
to Duluth, 30,000,000 feet. Bankers in Duhith esti- 
mate that it will take a hundred and thirty million 
dollars to move the wheat crop tributary to Duluth 
in 1903.'] 

" But above all, sir, let me implore you to reflect 
for a moment on the deplorable condition of our 
country in case of a foreign war, with all our ports 
blockaded, all our cities in a state of siege, the gaunt 
specter of famine brooding like a hungry vulture 

SS 



The Greater America 



over our starving land, our commissary stores all 
exhausted, our famished armies withering away in 
the field, our nav^y rotting in the docks, a helpless 
prey to the insatiate demon of hunger, and we without 
any railroad communication whatever with the pro- 
lific pine thicket of the St. Croix ! [One hundred mil- 
lion bushels of wheat raised along the Great Northern 
Railway tributary to Duluth in 1903.] 

" As I have said, sir, I was utterly at a loss to 
determine where the terminus of this great and indis- 
pensable railroad should be until I accidentally over- 
heard a gentleman mention the name of Duluth. 
Duluth ! The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar 
and indescribable charm. Duluth ! 'Twas the name 
for which my soul had panted for years, as a hart 
panteth for the water brooks. But where was 
Duluth? Never in my limited reading had my vision 
been gladdened by seeing the celestial word in print. 
I rushed to my library and examined all the maps I 
could find. I discovered in one of them a delicate, 
hairlike line diverging from the Mississippi, which 
I supposed was intended to represent the river St. 
Croix, but nowhere could I find Duluth. Neverthe- 
less I was confident that it existed somewhere and 
that its discovery would constitute the crowning 
glory of the present century. (Renewed laughter.) 
[Population of Duluth in 1906, 80,000.] 

" In fact, sir, I was overwhelmed with the con- 
viction that Duluth not only existed somewhere, but 

56 



The Confusion of a Prophet 



that wherever it was, it was a great and glorious 
place, {^Railroad lines tributary to Diduth, twenty- 
five thousand miles. 1^ 

" I have been told by gentlemen who have been 
so reckless of their personal safety as to venture 
away in those awful regions where Duluth is sup- 
posed to be that it is so exactly in the center of the 
visible universe that the sky comes down at pre- 
cisely the same distance all around it. It is alleged to 
be situated somewhere near the western end of Lake 
Superior. \^Arrivals and clearances of vessels in igo3, 
10,52^, registered tonnage, 20,goj, 2^1.1 

" I really cannot tell whether it is one of those 
ethereal creations of intellectual frost-work, one of 
those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which 
I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and 
cities along the lines of railroads built with govern- 
ment subsidies, or whether it was a real bona fide, 
substantial city, all staked off, with the lots marked 
with their owners' names, like that proud com- 
mercial metropolis recently discovered on the 
desirable shores of San Domingo. (Laughter.) 
[Taxable valuation of Duluth property in 1903, 
twenty-eight million dollar s.~\ 

" As to the commercial resources of Duluth, sir, 
they are simply illimitable and inexhaustible as 
shown by this map. [Bank capital, three million 
dollar s.'\ 

"... I see stated here that there is a vast 

57 



The Greater America 



scope of territory embracing an area of over three 
million square miles, rich in every element of material 
wealth and commercial prosperity, all tributary to 
Duluth. Here are inexhaustible mines of gold, 
immeasurable veins of silver, impenetrable depths of 
boundless forest, wide extended plains of richest pas- 
turage all embraced in this vast territory, which must, 
in the very nature of things, empty the untold treas- 
ures of its commerce into the lap of Duluth. 
(Laughter.) [/row ore shipped from Duluth district 
in igo^, 1^,000,000 tons. Total cut of lumber, one 
billion feet. Receipts of coal at head of Lake Su- 
perior, four million tons. Receipts of wheat, flaxseed, 
barley and oats, 6^,000,000 bushels.^ 

" I was about remarking, sir, upon these vast 
* wheat fields ' represented on this map [Duluth' s 
elevator capacity, ^^,000,000 bushels'] in the imme- 
diate neighborhood of the buffaloes and the Piegans 
and was about to say that the idea of there being these 
immense wheat fields in the very heart of a wilderness, 
hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond the ut- 
most verge of civilization, may appear to some 
gentlemen rather incongruous — as rather too great 
a strain on the rivets of veracity. [^Capacity of flour 
mills in i8g^, 2 1 ,100 barrels per day; flour shipments, 
6, 1 yd,! 1 3 barrels.] But, to my mind, there is no diffi- 
culty in the matter whatever. The phenomenon is 
very easily accounted for. It is evident, sir, that the 
Piegans sowed that wheat there and plowed it with 

58 



The Confusion of a Prophet 



buffalo bulls. (Great laughter.) Now, sir, this for- 
tunate combination of buffaloes and Piegans, consid- 
ering their relative positions to each other and to 
Duluth, as they are arranged on this map, satisfies 
me that Duluth is destined to be the beef market of 
the world. Here you will observe [pointing to the 
map] are the buffaloes, directly between the Piegans 
and Duluth; and here, right on the road to Duluth 
are the Creeks. Now, sir, when the buffaloes are 
sufficiently fat from grazing on these immense wheat 
fields, you will see it will be the easiest thing in the 
world for the Piegans to drive them on down, stay 
all night with their friends the Creeks, and go Into 
Duluth in the morning. I think I see them now, sir, 
a vast herd of buffaloes, with their heads down, their 
eyes glaring, their nostrils dilated, their tongues out 
and their tails curled over their backs, tearing along 
toward Duluth, with about a thousand Piegans on 
their grass-bellied ponies, yelling at their heels." 

A generation later than this prophetic utterance 
the long ore and grain steamers were swarming in 
squadrons to their docks at Duluth and Superior, or 
departing loaded to the hatches; and by night their 
whistles sounded a clamorous chorus that was singu- 
larly eloquent of the wonderful commerce of which 
they were the links between the mines and the prairie 
to the westward and the mills to the eastward of 
them. The smoke-bannered chimneys of Pittsburg 
were waiting for them, and their freightage must 

59 



The Greater America 



be fashioned into the steel that is the sinews of 
prosperity. 

The mines of the Mesabi Range are a httle way 
distant from Duluth, up among the pine-lands of 
Minnesota, and I sought them to see the most won- 
derful deposit ever uncovered on the globe. The 
railroad out of Duluth into the iron country plunged 
into a pioneer landscape of tiny towns girt about by 
forest. Most of the houses and barns were built 
of logs. The lumberman was at work in these vast 
unkempt tracts of charred stump-land, wilderness 
clearing and tracts of standing pine. It was still a 
bold, rude corner of the Northwest, into which the 
settler was slowly following the lumberman and the 
miner. 

The iron country could not be mistaken for any- 
thing else in the first glimpse of it. I came at length 
to the town of Hibbing, which was set down in the 
midst of so amazingly devastated a landscape that 
It appeared to have been plowed, tossed up and 
excavated by earthquakes and tornadoes, working 
hand in hand. 

Nothing more unlike the clean and rural aspect 
of the Superior copper country could be Imagined. 
This looked more like an industrial inferno, for all 
the mines were on top of the ground. As a traveler 
on the train observed: 

" This piece of country has surely been torn to a 
frazzle." 

60 



The Confusion of a Prophet 



The explanation of the chaos was that the ore beds 
were so amazingly rich that steam shovels instead of 
miners' picks simply scooped off the surface of the 
earth and loaded It Into cars which bore it swiftly 
to Duluth and dumped It Into the open holds of the 
steamers at the gravity docks. Ore which had lain 
undisturbed for countless ages was scooped up In this 
fashion, carried to the vessels, borne down the lake 
and shoveled Into the Pittsburg furnaces, to be fash- 
ioned Into rails and billets In less than a week's time. 

I walked along the main street of HIbbIng and 
faced on the outskirts of the town a series of great 
gray mountains of earth which had been stripped 
from the surface by the steam shovels so that they 
could bite Into the ore just beneath. Everywhere 
were these puffing steam shovels at work, digging 
their way deeper Into the open craters they had made, 
moving along the strips of railroad track that were 
laid for their convenience. 

These railroad lines were laid down to-day and 
ripped up to-morrow, and yet long trams of ore- 
laden cars drawn by huge freight engines were puffing 
along them, ascending from open pits that were 
like pictures of volcanic destruction. The nearest 
mine looked to be half a mile deep and a mile wide, 
so impressive was it to come upon this Immense hole 
In the ground which upset all previous notions of 
mining methods and backgrounds. Far below the 
steam shovels were toiling like so many ants, their 

6i 



The Greater America 



white puffs of vapor rising like breath on a frosty 
inorning. They were attacking the brown dust with 
marvelous and furious activity, taking five tons of 
ore at one bite and spitting it into the car beside 
them. 

One of these infernally energetic monsters, with a 
crew of only five men, was mining ore, sixty-five per 
cent, pure iron, at the rate of three thousand tons a 
day. In one day's work a handful of men in one of 
these mines was getting out enough ore to fill the 
hold of a twelve-thousand ton lake steamer. 

Thirty million tons of ore were scooped from this 
tract in the working season of two years ago, and 
hundreds of acres of as rich beds as these were being 
drilled and prospected before their blankets of pine 
woodlands and underbrush should be ripped off to 
expose their marvelous treasure. More than a hun- 
dred million dollars' worth of iron ore was being dug 
out from this tract in a single year, a tide of reddish- 
brown dust which was transmuted by one of the most 
astounding of modern miracles into sky-scrapers and 
railroads, machinery and locomotives as fast as it 
could be hurried down the Lakes. 



62 




•SI. 



fl 



CHAPTER V 

THE PEOPLING OF THE PRAIRIE 

There are two centuries in time and two thousand 
miles in distance between the New England village 
and the stretch of North Dakota prairie on which 
I found the newest manifestation of the vital spirit 
of a pioneering nation. In an expanse of country 
larger than many Eastern States, it was possible to 
see unfolding, like a panorama, such a movement of 
population as settled first the Atlantic States and 
later the Middle West. As I saw this North 
Dakota prairie in the autumn, it was a cross section 
of American history in the making. 

Into this great new wheat belt that stretched north 
to the Canadian boundary had come thousands of 
home seekers, not from the overcrowded East, but 
from Iowa and Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan and 
Missouri. They had come to till millions of acres 
that had never felt a plow, to make new towns, to 
redeem the empty places, as their fathers had done 
when they trailed across the Mississippi from the 
eastward, before the railroad came. 

The railroad! — this was the magic key that 
unlocked this newest country. It was early morning 
when I joined the construction train of the latest rail- 
road to reach up into this thinly peopled vastness of 



The Greater America 



American soil. Air that sparkled, a cloudless sky, 
and miles upon miles of brown, grass-carpeted prairie 
that lay flat as a lake to the horizon, made the swarm- 
ing streets of Eastern cities seem a world away. 

Here was the firing line of American civilization. 
North and east and west the prairie was almost as 
empty as the sea. But instead of lonely vessels 
against the sky line there were here and there, miles 
apart, the low sod houses and shacks of the " home- 
steaders " who had come into this country ahead of 
the railroad. These pioneers had been waiting to be 
linked with the world beyond, meanwhile hauling 
their wheat fifty or eighty miles to the nearest town, 
suffering hardships, in privation and loneliness, to 
compare with those of the men and women who 
settled New England. They had been led here In- 
spired by that dearest of incentives to American cour- 
age and endurance — the ownership of home and land. 

Now, at length, the railroad was marching toward 
them at the splendid gait of two miles a day. The 
hundreds of laborers who were flinging the track 
across the prairie had no time to think of ultimate 
results. Upon the raw, new grade that ran straight 
as an arrow into the lonely north, the track-laying 
machine was feeding out rails as fast as they could 
be " bridled," bolted, spiked, and thrown Into line. 
"Wrenchers" and "heelers," "splkers," "peddlers" 
and " Iron men " were busy as so many ants, and 
every little while a brakeman perched aloft on a 

64 




•«■•■ 



Mr' 










'-MsiHf^' 



The loii' sod lioi/se of the hoiiivstedder 




Sprouting buildings from the prairie srroiv U'ith inconceivable rapidity 



The Confusion of a Prophet 



platform above the " pioneer car " flourished an arm. 
The engineer nodded from his cab window, " gave 
her a little steam," and the train was shoved ahead 
over the track it had just laid. 

Charley Ffolliet, the contractor in command, 
sauntered to and fro with a specious air of leisure, 
but it was to be noticed that his foremen and their 
" straw bosses," or assistants, did not appear to be 
loafing. System, order, energy were driving full- 
speed ahead, without waste, flurry or lost motion. 
This stocky, smiling North of Ireland man, Ffolliet, 
had built thousands of miles of railroad through the 
Northwest. He had hewn ledges for his track to 
cling to in the heart of the Cascades and the Rockies, 
where the sheer drop was a half mile, and had twisted 
the ribbons of steel around corners and through passes 
where only the mountain sheep and the surveying out- 
fit had found footing. 

There seemed to be no place for sentiment in this 
headlong drive of men and machinery, but the con- 
struction boss was reminded of a story during his 
brief dinner hour and it threw an odd bit of very 
human feeling into this rude business of railroad 
building. 

" I once had a foreman named ' Dirty Face ' Char- 
ley," said Ffolliet, " and he was a hard-working, 
close-mouthed kind of a slob without a streak of 
sentiment in him as far as you could see with the 
naked eye. His only close friend was his partner 

65 



The Greater America 



or bunkie, and these two used to get drunk together 
and fight for each other and run a close corporation 
generally. One day the partner up and died while 
we were laying a stretch of track across the prairie 
like that yonder. There was no town within twenty 
miles, and the country was too new to have a cemetery 
within a hundred miles. ' Dirty Face ' Charley came 
to me and asked for the loan of a couple of men to 
help dig his partner's grave. I ordered two Italian 
hands from the grading gang to go with him, but 
this wouldn't do at all. The tears were rolling down 
Charley's face as he turned back to me and blubbered: 

" ' You mean well, and I'm obliged to you, Mr. 
Ffolllet, but no blankey-blankety-blank Dagoes can 
dig Jim's grave. If you'll give me a half day off, I'll 
dig it lone-handed.' 

" We bosses turned to with shovels, for there was 
no withstanding such loyalty as this, and Jim was 
buried by what Charley called ' white men.' " 

This prairie construction was like a holiday task, 
a diversion In railroad making for Ffolllet, and yet he 
was driving his men and trains as fast as material 
could be handled. It was not easy to see why there 
should be so much haste to cross this almost empty 
prairie. Where were the people, where was the 
freight to make It worth while? There was no 
terminal city nor any trunk line beyond. A few 
miles more and the work of the construction gangs 
would be done. They would double back over their 

66 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



track, leaving the road to end on just such a brown 
and monotonous stretch of prairie as this. 

The answer to this riddle lay in the wake of the 
construction train. Only a few hundred yards behind 
the track-layers there was a town, Sarles by name. 
It was not yet a month old. A bank was open for 
business. Grocery and hardware stores, the post- 
office, and a hotel, unpainted and crude, were hum- 
ming with activity, hope and industry. Grain ele- 
vators were climbing skyward as fast as men could 
be found to use hammer and saw, A lumber yard 
was crowded with teams hauling material for more 
banks and stores and warehouses. You could not 
have found a busier town than Sarles in the United 
States. 

And yet there seemed no more excuse for the town 
than for the railroad. Within sight of Sarles the 
prairie held perhaps a half dozen farm-houses as far 
as one could see. But across the country were crawl- 
ing four-horse wagons from all quarters of the com- 
pass. These were the " grain tanks " of the farmers, 
hauling their wheat to the railroad, coming into 
Sarles to sell their harvest to the elevator men, to 
cash their checks in the bank of Sarles, to spend their 
money in its stores. The few acres upon which this 
town had sprung up in a matter of days had already 
become a distributing business and shipping center for 
a wheat-growing country perhaps thirty miles square. 
The railroad had no need to bid for traffic. It was 

67 



The Greater America 



paying for Itself as fast as the rails were laid. It 
was like the flood from a bursting dam, this building 
and settling behind the construction train. Sarles was 
one of three towns in twenty miles, looking alike as 
so many peas in a pod, differing in size according to 
their several ages of from one to three months. 

This stretch of railroad was one of five Great 
Northern extensions flung up into a belt of new coun- 
try two hundred miles long, within the last three 
years. They reach out like the teeth of a comb 
toward the Canadian boundary, thirty to fifty miles 
between them, as instruments by which this territory 
is being dotted with towns, many of them future 
cities. If you care to see how the thing is done, let 
us go up forty miles to the end of another of these 
extensions. Here is the town of Antler. The rail- 
road came to it about three weeks ago, therefore 
Antler can be conservatively called one month old. 
Its founders began to build even ahead of the rail- 
road, and they lived in tents until lumber could be 
hauled to them over the new track. 

Four weeks in the life of an Eastern town is but 
a day. The man who leaves it for a month returns 
to find the main street looking as he left it, and he 
would be immensely surprised to find any changes 
worth his notice. But the man of North Dakota 
who drove to Antler a month ago would have found 
a railroad grade waiting for the rails, and a patch 
of brown prairie, with nothing to indicate that this 

68 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



area would not be plowed for wheat this year. Visit- 
ing the site of Antler a month later, he finds three 
lumber yards, two banks (two banks, mind you), a 
drug store, two restaurants, a livery stable, two gen- 
eral stores, five grain elevators finished and one 
building, and men hammering and digging and haul- 
ing by night as well as day. 

The town has grown faster than the railroad can 
keep pace with it, and the station is not yet built. 
On a siding stands a box car with a flight of wooden 
steps leading up to its side door, and a stove-pipe 
poked through the roof. An alert and capable young 
woman reigns within as station and express agent 
and telegraph operator. She has even fenced off one 
corner of the car near the stove as a " waiting-room." 
It is such an insignificant looking makeshift of a 
station and the town is so incredibly new that the 
information she bestows in reply to your questions is 
staggering : 

" In the first two weeks the station was opened, 
the freight receipts at Antler were ten thousand dol- 
lars. This is big, if you happen to know that three 
hundred dollars' worth of business a month justified 
the company in building a station and putting in a 
salaried agent. The country looks kind of empty to 
a stranger, doesn't it ? There doesn't look to be much 
of anything besides Antler on this part of the map. 
And Antler isn't what you would call a metropolis 
back east in Michigan where I was raised. But 

69 



The Greater America 



this little, brand-new town will ship out a million 
bushels of wheat this fall. That means nearly seven 
hundred thousand dollars in cash coming in to these 
farmers around here, and most of it spent right here 
in Antler. And that pays for a good many miles of 
track over this flat country. Oh, we are doing pretty 
well, thank you." 

A salesman for a St. Paul hardware house comes 
in to find out when he may expect to get some ship- 
ments into the town. 

" I've driven three hundred miles across lots In 
the last six days," he confides. " I crossed four of 
these new railroad extensions, and struck fourteen of 
these towns made while you wait. Found them all 
the way from a week to a year old. I slept in a hotel 
only one night, because everybody was so busy build- 
ing stores and elevators that they couldn't stop to put 
up hotels. I sold ten thousand dollars' worth of 
stoves in the six days. Five thousand dollars' worth 
was ordered by men In the new towns who haven't 
built their stores yet. They expect to have the stores 
up by the time the stoves get there." 

What Is known as the Thorne extension Is typical 
of this amazingly new and lusty civilization. Thirty 
miles of road had been finished In July. I went over 
It early In September, six weeks after the railroad 
opened this wheat-raising prairie, six weeks after the 
first town was begun. Three towns were already In 
a white heat of activity. McCumber had risen from 

70 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



the prairie twenty-five days before I saw It. A two- 
story bank block loomed grandly in the foreground, 
flanked by stores and elevators. Only a third of a 
mile away was a rival city In embryo, Rolette, also 
sprouting buildings from the prairie grass with in- 
credible rapidity. While the Great Northern was 
hurrying its branch roads north and south, the " Soo " 
Line was cutting this territory east and west, In a 
stirring race against time for a share of the year's 
wheat harvest. A crossing of the two roads hap- 
pened to fall between McCumber and Rolette. The 
former was the " Great Northern town," the latter 
the " Soo town." 

Municipal expansion will Inevitably cause the 
suburbs of one to collide with the outskirts of the 
other. The unbiased observer would conclude that 
there was no room for both Infants. But It would 
not be safe to suggest this to a man of McCumber 
unless you picked Rolette as the probable victim. 
The two towns sat side by side on the prairie, crow- 
ing at each other like two very young bantam roost- 
ers. For spirit they were St. Paul and Minneapolis 
In miniature. They have seen other towns, started 
under similar conditions, wax rich In people and 
wealth. They can go back Into history, for example, 
and talk about the comparatively ancient town of 
Cando, on a neighboring extension. In a recent 
spring season forty automobiles were shipped Into 
Cando, bought by the farmers In the near-by country, 

71 



The Greater America 



half of them thirty horse-power machines. Cando 
has thirteen hundred people, and is as prosperous as 
the automobile market indicates. 

These towns come into being because the West 
is full of men who are always on the qui vive for new 
opportunities to create, to produce, to make a town 
where none grew before. As the railroad invades the 
virgin territory, the towns spring up according to a 
general plan that smacks of a problem in geometry. 
There are no rivers, no forests, no mines, nothing to 
make for advantages of location. There is no obvi- 
ous reason why a town should be here instead of there, 
a few miles beyond or a few miles back. 

The farmer ought to be able to haul his wheat not 
more than ten miles to the elevator. Therefore the 
town site is mapped out to draw upon a certain wheat- 
raising radius. And beyond that radius another town 
is projected, like placing checkers on certain squares 
on the board. 

The town Is even announced before it happens. 
The railroad issues such statements as these : 

" This extension will run forty-two miles from 
York, northwest through the Island Lake country, 
and will have five good North Dakota towns. The 
stations on the line will be well equipped with ele- 
vators, and will be constructed and ready for opera- 
tion at the commencement of the grain season. Pro- 
spective merchants have been active in securing desira- 
ble locations at the different towns on the line. There 

72 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



are still opportunities for hotels, general merchan- 
dise, hardware, furniture and drug stores, etc." 

Such is the spirit of American enterprise, which 
builds its towns on paper before the railroad track 
has been laid past their sites. 

I traveled a thousand miles up and down these 
Great Northern extensions visiting thirty-one towns 
in their swaddling clothes, and found every one of 
them ablaze with confidence that it was certain to 
surpass in population and prosperity all of its sister 
infants. In their main essentials, they were bewilder- 
ingly alike. There was the main business street laid 
out like a boulevard for width, vastly expensive to 
pave whenever that step in development should be 
reached. There had not been time to build " resi- 
dence sections " in most of them. The workers lived 
in the hotel or over their stores, and the few dwellings 
clung close to the clustered beginnings of the town, as 
if reluctant to scatter over the bare and wind-swept 
prairie. 

One of the hardships of living in these new settle- 
ments is the lack of good water. To the towns which 
spring up over night the tank wagons trail from 
miles away to supply enough water for drinking. 
A locomotive is the thirstiest brute in all creation, 
and millions of gallons a day must be supplied along 
these pioneer railroad extensions. It is superfluous to 
remark that for absence of superstitious and sentimen- 
tal nonsense of all kinds a great railway corporation 

73 



The Greater America 



Is almost in a class by itself. If a silly or un- 
founded romance is afloat, it is not likely to find a 
welcome refuge in the practical headpiece of a general 
manager. 

It was, therefore, rather startling to fall in with an 
elderly and dignified gentleman, a conductor of many 
years' service on this system, who had been detailed 
on special duty from the General Manager's office to 
search for water supplies with the aid of a divining rod 
or " water-witching " outfit. It may be that his errand 
was in the nature of a cheerful gamble after other 
resources had failed, but the fact remained that Mr. 
Eastman was on the ground equipped for business, 
and that our train waited upon his investigations. 

His outfit was simple. A friend, acting as assist- 
ant " witcher," carried a bundle of freshly cut witch- 
hazel boughs, trimmed in V-shaped branches, the 
leaves and buds still on them. The two men disem- 
barked. From up the raw, new street of the town 
that was not more than a month old, gathered a score 
of merchants, farmers and idlers. They greeted the 
visitors with interest and respect. This looking for 
water touched upon a vital matter in their daily lives. 
They were still hauling their drinking water in tank 
wagons from a spring a mile out of town, and the 
water was sold at so much a gallon. 

Mr. Eastman, stout, conventional as to dress, and 
looking as essentially practical as a veteran railroad 
man ought to appear, took one of the V-shaped 

74 




A prairie water wagon 




The ivatcr-witcher at ivork 



v4 




J 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



witch-hazel boughs, and tightly grasped the pliant 
ends in his two fists, holding the crotch or point 
upright. Thus equipped he moved sedately across 
the prairie. The witch-hazel remained upright for 
perhaps fifty feet. The crowd trailed in behind, 
vastly curious. Presently the bough began to turn, 
or waver. The inverted V twisted slowly down until 
It was parallel with the earth, or pointing straight 
out from the bearer. 

He slackened his gait and moved ahead, while the 
telltale bough moved slowly down until it was point- 
ing toward the soil. Now the " water-witcher " had 
it so grasped that it was twisting in his fists, and the 
tender bark along the pliant ends was beginning to 
break, showing that some force other than muscular 
effort was pulling the bough toward the earth. When 
It pointed straight down he stopped and heeled a 
mark In the grass. 

Then he moved on, and very slowly the branch 
began to rise, until at length It had returned to the 
perpendicular, In Its original position. The vein of 
water had been passed, and the witch-hazel was no 
longer attracted. 

" There Is your water back there," said Mr. East- 
man, with the air of a man who is backing a " sure 
thing." When asked to explain he said: 

" Whatever kind of attraction there may be, I 
know It Is there. I have located fifty wells along the 
railway without failure. I picked it up when I was 

75 



The Greater America 



a boy of thirteen, by watching an old, bhnd negro 
' witch ' for water on my father's farm. Not every 
one can succeed at it. There must be something in 
the theory of a magnetic current flowing between the 
operator and the hidden water through the medium 
of the green willow or the witch-hazel. I can't 
explain it, any more than I can tell you why one man 
succeeds at ' water-witching ' and another fails. 

" I have located a flowing well alongside five dry 
wells that had been located in the ordinary fashion, I 
must have found nearly five hundred good wells in 
the Dakotas, Montana and Idaho in the last twenty- 
five years. There isn't anything in it for me, and I 
have no reason for trying any bunco games. 

" Do I voluntarily twist the twigs? Not on your 
life. Grip one end, next my hand, and see if you can 
keep it from twisting, or take one end by yourself 
as we go back. 

" There, what did I tell you? Of course it twists 
of itself. Why, I have had my hands blister from 
the force with which the twigs pull down when there 
is water close to the surface. After you have located 
water, you must walk away from it until the twigs 
are upright again. The distance between the loca- 
tion and this other point will give you a rough esti- 
mate of the number of feet in depth you must dig 
before you are likely to strike water." 

Now there is this to be said of Mr. Eastman: 
Not only does Mr. James J. Hill's railroad think It 

76 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



worth while to go " water-witching," but their 
" water-witcher " is not the kind of a man who can 
be accused of any mushy sentimentahty. He is gray- 
bearded and elderly, and there is something almost 
patriarchal in his aspect. But appearances were never 
more deceitful. For as a Great Northern conductor 
he has been for years noted as the most sudden and 
valiant person to look out for the interests of the 
road when trouble is brewing on large consignments 
aboard a passenger train. 

It is still his delight to welcome to his train a car- 
load of Minnesota " lumber-jacks," just come out of 
the woods, full of bad whisky and violent purposes. 
Mr. Eastman has made a habit of wading through 
such storm centers with a fighting " lumber-jack " 
hanging to every corner of his frame. It Is in the 
Interests of peace and order on the train; the " scrap- 
pers " invariably " hit the gravel " when Mr. East- 
man Is done with them. It would be absurd to accuse 
such a hard-headed and hard-fisted railroad veteran 
as this of harboring a " stray superstition " for no 
obvious purpose. 

There were no saloons in this prairie belt, for 
North Dakota is under the sway of a prohibition law. 
Whereas the saloon Is the pioneer enterprise in the 
mining camp, the bank took the lead in this whole- 
some kind of creation. There were towns with a 
dozen stores, four hundred people and three banks. 
In fact, the nucleus of such a town is a group of 

77 



The Greater America 



elevators, the " general store," and the bank. There 
was one town, Munich, whose history ran back some 
twelve months, in which three of the four corners 
of one block on the main street were occupied by 
banks. It is an upside down condition of pioneer 
settlement when banks are so amazingly numerous 
and saloons so conspicuously missing. 

Of course, the newspaper came arm in arm with 
the country banker. At Mohall, I met the editor of 
The Tribune, a flourishing weekly with nothing 
" countrified " in its make-up. He would not have 
exchanged positions with the owner of the New York 
Herald. He was growing up with the country and 
he had come in " on the ground floor." 

" You think it's a little early to be running a news- 
paper up here? " he said. " Why, I had two papers 
going before the railroad got here, one in this town, 
and another at Sherwood. We don't wait for the 
railroad. It has to hustle to keep up with us folks. 
When the extension got to Sherwood, it found the 
town built, doing business and waiting for it." 

These towns in their infancy, rising by scores on 
the prairie, were essentially American in their spirit, 
their purposes and their destinies. They were being 
peopled not by foreign immigrants, but by the men 
and women of the Middle West who were not afraid 
to ** take chances." The schoolhouse and the church 
would follow the grain elevator, the bank and the 
crude, new " main street " which ran into a trail 

78 



The Peopling of the Prairie 



across the blank prairie. Some of these towns may 
collapse and vanish, but most of them will grow into 
solidity and lose their raw edges. For the brick and 
stone business block and high school, the pavement, 
the water-works and lighting plant are only a year or 
two behind the pioneer in such a movement as this. 



79 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MAGNET OF THE WHEAT 

Wheat is the magnet that drew these people and 
that created these towns as if by magic. I had only 
to step into the middle of the main street of one of 
these towns to see on the prairie beyond the smoke 
of the threshing outfits, far and near. As they moved 
slowly across the landscape or spouted the golden 
straw, they suggested so many twentieth century drag- 
ons of a benevolent temperament. By day the 
smoke and turmoil of the threshers, by night the 
blaze of burning straw stacks — the infant towns were 
ringed around with the signs of the riches that create 
the need for them. 

The railroad was fairly blocked with cars crammed 
with wheat. Seventy-five acres of wheat, twenty 
bushels to the acre, were swept into one of these cars, 
and one huge engine hauled to market seventy-five 
of these carloads. Therefore one of these trains, 
which fairly trod on one another's heels through the 
autumn, contained the harvest from 5,625 acres. 
Herein was the secret of this wonderful building 
development. 

Ahead of the town came the pioneer wheat-raiser 
who made the town possible. Now a population 

80 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



cannot be picked up bodily and transplanted like so 
many heads of cabbage. It must be led to move into 
new regions, to sever the ties that bind it to old homes, 
kinsfolk, old friends, to the very soil and landscape 
it has always known. In the one decade beginning 
with 1894, one hundred thousand people were per- 
suaded to forsake the lands that bore them, and to 
make new homes that brought under cultivation eight 
million acres of prairie land that had belonged to the 
Indian and the buffalo, and after them to the cattle- 
man. This movement is a fine, big American story 
in itself. 

James J. Hill Is the greatest of living empire- 
builders. Stretching a railroad across the continent 
was only one end of the task he blocked out for 
himself. His railroad was worthless without a popu- 
lation. Therefore he became the leader of a migra- 
tion which has been carried on so quietly that it Is 
Impressive only when the statistics are bulked In this 
fashion. These hundred thousand men, women and 
children led up toward the northern frontier were 
not sought in the steerages of Atlantic steamers. This 
was not a foreign movement such as In a previous 
generation had settled large areas of Minnesota and 
Wisconsin. The missionaries who preached the gos- 
pel of " Jim " Hill went into the Virginias, Iowa, 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Nebraska. 

From the eastern view-point these States and sec- 
tions are far from being over-crowded. Yet they 

81 



The Greater America 



have largely peopled this part of the new northwest, 
while at the same time they have steadily increased 
their own wealth and population. In other words, 
while there has been no economic loss to the older 
States, there has been a splendid gain to the nation, 
which Is bigger and better and stronger because 
energy and industry have found new fields to conquer. 

Twenty-four years ago the Great Northern car- 
ried only two hundred and fifty-eight thousand bush- 
els of wheat from harvest in this north country. In 
1905 it hauled one hundred million bushels of wheat, 
oats, barley and flax out of its own territory. Much 
of this tremendously increased contribution to the 
wealth of the country was made by the great army of 
stout-hearted pilgrims from the older States. 

These people were seemingly rooted in their native 
soil, on the farm, in the shop and the store, struggling 
perhaps, but always hoping for better fortune, expect- 
ing to end their days where they were. Among them 
came the agents of a railroad that was crying for 
strong men and farms and towns. These strangers 
had no land for sale. Therefore they did not color 
the facts. They did not want weak-kneed failures 
chronically incapable of bettering themselves. In 
school and court houses, in country halls and cross- 
road post-oflices, from dry-goods boxes, in town 
squares and at political rallies, from valley to hilltop, 
these crusaders talked and lectured of " the land of 
opportunity " in the northern half of North Dakota, 

82 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



in Minnesota and Montana. It was a campaign of 
several years, waged with a common-sense intelli- 
gence. Its arguments were of a straight-from-the- 
shoulder, American l<^ind. Their tenor was like this : 

" You see your children come out of school with 
no chance to get farms of their own, because the cost 
of land in your older part of the country is so high 
that you can't afford to buy land to start your sons 
out in life around you. They have to go to the cities 
to make a living, or become laborers in the mills or 
hire out as farm-hands. There is no future for them 
here. If you are doing well where you are and can 
safeguard the future of your children, and see them 
prosper around you, don't leave here. But if you 
want independence, if you are renting your land, if 
the money-lender is carrying you along and you are 
running behind year after year, you can do no worse 
by moving. Just say to yourself : 

" ' Here goes nothing. Things cannot be any 
worse up there. Maybe there is something better In 
store for me.' 

" Every man who moves upon North Dakota can 
have a half mile square of rich land, one hundred 
and sixty acres, which is his own little kingdom. It 
will increase in value as the country settles around 
him. In a few years his homestead is worth several 
thousand dollars. He is his own master, he is making 
a living, and he can look every man unflinchingly In 
the eye. 

83 



The Greater A7nerica 



" You farmers talk of free trade and protection 
and what this or that political party will do for you. 
Why don't you vote a homestead for yourself? That 
Is the only thing Uncle Sam will ever give you. Jim 
Hill hasn't an acre of land to sell you. We are not In 
the real-estate business. We don't want you to go 
up there and make a failure of It, because the rates at 
which we haul you and your goods make the first 
transaction a loss. It Is a case of fair play and co- 
operation. We must have landless men for a manless 
land." 

You may be sure there was much earnest discussion 
through the countryside, much reading of railroad 
literature in long winter evenings, much wagging of 
gray beards while these arguments were threshed 
out. At length a few heads of families, men esteemed 
for truth and good judgment In their communities, 
would be sent up to spy out the land. They found 
that It was good, and sent for their women folk. In 
the winter these pioneers, whose pockets were bulg- 
ing with the cash received for their first wheat crop, 
visited their old homes and talked over the new 
country by the firesides and In the corner stores. 

The snowball was set rolling. It swelled Into a 
"concentration movement." This meant nothing less 
than sending home-seekers northward by the train- 
load. If home Is the word most freighted with emo- 
tions to stir the heart, then " home-seeker " becomes 
a phrase with more power than all others to kindle 

84 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



the imagination of an American. It holds within 
itself the history of the nation's creation and growth. 

Successor in direct line to the ox teams and the 
prairie schooner of the Overland Trail, these railroad 
trains were carrying into another century the story 
of the pioneers. In 1894 the first wave of this 
so-called " concentration " tide flowed out from In- 
diana. Fourteen passenger coaches were filled with 
men, women and children, and forty-five freight cars 
carried their household goods and live stock. In the 
spring of 1898 more than five thousand people were 
moved In March and April as part of this movement. 
The tide of migration rose steadily higher, until five 
years later one party assembled at Chicago numbered 
two thousand eight hundred souls, mostly farmers 
and their families from the Middle West. They 
moved to North Dakota in five long passenger trains, 
and six freight trains were filled with their goods. 
In 1900 a large party was taken out of the Shenan- 
doah Valley, which for generations has been famed 
as a rich and fruitful farming section. 

Now these people of American birth had left their 
farms and their homes to begin life over again; wives 
and mothers, old men and young, sweethearts and 
babies, a thousand miles from their own country. 
From old and settled communities they were going 
into a land that a generation ago was called unfit for 
habitation, scourged by drought and blizzards. Gen- 
eral Sibley in 1863 wrote of North Dakota: 

85 



The Greater America 



" If the devil were to select a residence on earth, 
he would probably choose this particular district for 
his abode, with the redskins' murdering and plunder- 
ing bands as his ready ministers." 

Each family was permitted to take free of railroad 
charge ten head of live stock, together with its house- 
hold goods and farming implements. When their 
trains trailed up into the new land the pilgrims were 
emptied into little towns just springing up, or dropped 
upon the bare and open prairie, one hundred here, 
two hundred there. Once a party of two thousand 
overflowed one village of four hundred people. The 
few settlers who had arriv^ed before them drove in 
from many miles around and helped the newcomers 
as best they could. The freight cars were backed on 
sidings and used to sleep in until the immigrants could 
build their own homes. Every dwelling, store, 
church and schoolhouse within twenty miles was filled 
to overflowing with these families. 

Within a week, however, the overflow had van- 
ished from the little towns, and the freight cars on 
the prairie siding lost their lodgers. The immigrants 
brought their horses and farm wagons with them. 
As soon as their homestead claims were located and 
filed, they hauled out lumber to build shacks, or with 
the help of neighbors made their sod houses. Then 
the " homesteader " loaded his family, his household 
goods and his farming tools into his wagon, and 
trailed out across the prairie to his new home. The 

86 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



day after he had put the house to rights he began to 
break the land for the spring sowing of wheat. 

The prairie fairly seemed to swallow these thou- 
sands of settlers and to cry for more. No railroad 
extensions gridironed the country during this first 
stage of development. As homestead lands became 
scarcer, those who could not afford to buy land within 
twenty miles of the main line went on and on, and 
built their shacks as far as a hundred miles from the 
nearest town. Therefore when these migrating hosts 
moved out to find their " locations," It was like the 
departure of a great fleet of fishing boats that scatter 
over a smooth sea, then, one by one, drop hull down 
and vanish. 

The loneliness and homesickness of the pioneers 
of these prairies is not a new story. What they suf- 
fered In Kansas and Nebraska, they fought through 
in this latest migration into North Dakota. They 
endured and conquered In the spirit that glows In 
every line of the following verses. They are better 
than any attempts at description, for the author, 
James J. Somers, of Renville, Is a North Dakota man 
who lived the life whose trials he so vividly sings: 

" I am one of the Pioneers 

Of North Dakota State. 
At Hill's request I came out West 

In search of real estate. 
I filed along the Cut Bank Creek, 

Just forty miles from rail ; 

87 



The Greater America 



And I started farming with a hoe 
Along the Minot trail. 



The hardships that we did endure, 

From hunger and from cold, 
I haven't time to tell you. 

Or it never will be told. 
To start from Minot with a load 

And face a northwest gale, 
It would break your heart, right on the start, 

Along the Minot trail. 



** The rivers they were far apart, 

And a well was something new. 
It often tickled us to find 

Some water in a slough. 
I used to have a demijohn — 

I called it " ginger-ale " — 
Once in a while we'd take a smile 

Along the Minot trail. 

" The only fuel that we knew 
Was prairie hay and straw. 
From November until April 

We never had a thaw. 
I often thought I'd rather be 

In some good warm jail, 
While twisting hay both night and day 
Along the Minot trail. 
88 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



" And when the snow would disappear 

The gophers would begin. 
They'd eat up everything we sowed, 

And then we'd sow again. 
If I could scheme some new device 

To kill the flicker-tail, 
I might stand a show with my old hoe 

Along the Minot trail." 

In a more jubilant strain this poet has sung a sequel 
to his tale of stress and woe : 

" There's no corporation 
Can dictate our ration. 
For strikes or for boycotts 
We don't care a whoop." 

His muse sings a top-note of triumph in these lines, 
where it Is fitting that we leave him : 

" The gophers we've banished, 
The shacks have all vanished, 
Except for an odd one 

That's used as a coop. 
On each claim there's a mansion 
Where stockmen were ranchin' 
Just four years ago 

In the Mouse River Loop." 

Many men took their families Into this region with- 
out even the cash needed to " make a start." They 

89 



The Greater America 



hired themselves out to more prosperous farmers as 
teamsters and laborers, filed their homestead claims, 
and toiled for wages, saving a little all the time, until 
they could build their own shacks and buy horses and 
farm machinery. There is not much of the romantic 
or picturesque in such stories as these, but the men 
behind them are the kind of men and their deeds are 
the kind of deeds that make the backbone of their 
country. 

A sun-browned six-footer — all bone and muscle — 
was driving to town on top of a load of " No. i 
hard " wheat, and halted long enough to tell me his 
little story of success: 

" I settled on my claim seven years ago without a 
cent. All I had coming to me was the use of a yoke 
of oxen to work for two weeks. The season was so 
dry that all I could break in two weeks was twelve 
acres, but I was proud of that much, and in the fall 
I worked at sowing and putting up a little shanty with 
wood sides and a sod roof. Now I have a nice, 
comfortable little house and granary, a hundred and 
thirty acres under cultivation, stock and machinery 
to work the farm, and this year threshed out four 
thousand bushels of grain. This is the country for a 
poor man if he wants to carve out his home with his 
own two hands." 

The self-made man of the eastern city who views 
the farmer at large as a down-trodden clodhopper 
with singular taste in the fashion of whiskers may 

90 




j: 
■^ 



y i 




K5 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



be enlightened by this tale of a wheat-raiser who 
worked with his brains and his hands: 

" I came to North Dakota twenty-one years ago 
from Iowa. I had six broken-down plugs of horses, 
two steers and two plows. Had no money and was a 
thousand dollars in debt. I rented a farm for five 
years before I bought any land. Then I made up my 
mind to buy land on my own account, and bought 
two sections on time. Then I kept on raising wheat 
and buying land until I owned five thousand acres of 
land, all paid for. In the twenty-one years I cleared 
out of the ground in clean money, raising wheat, two 
hundred and forty thousand dollars. Last year I 
sold four thousand acres and have quit raising wheat. 
I am now on my way to Cuba, where my wife and I 
will spend the winter. Whenever I go back East I 
try to get my old friends and neighbors to come out 
here and share my prosperity." 

The wheat-raiser of the rich prairie takes his gold 
from the soil with almost none of the drudgery that 
goes with real farming. He plows and sows, riding 
behind his horses across his fenceless quarter or half 
" section." He labors no more until his crop Is har- 
vested by machinery. The grain Is threshed for him 
and he hauls It to the nearest elevator, where he Is 
paid cash on delivery. His outdoor work Is finished 
three months after it began. In his first year he may 
reap profits sufficient to pay for his land, his house 
and his tools. It Is not uncommon to clear thirteen 

91 



The Greater America 



hundred to fifteen hundred dollars from one harvest 
on a hundred and sixty acres. The average farm in 
North Dakota contains three hundred and forty-two 
acres, and nine in every ten men own the farms they 
live on. 

There is a black cloud on this bright picture if a 
wheat crop fails. The wheat-raiser has put all his 
eggs into one basket. He has not learned the value 
of diversified farming, for nature's prodigal gener- 
osity is his argument against toiling by the sweat of 
his brow. As he followed the cattle-men, so the 
farmer will follow him in a third stage of develop- 
ment, as population crowds into his country. Mean- 
time he drives ten or twenty miles to cast his vote, 
he sends his children to school and college, and he 
takes a good deal of pride in his town, his county, 
his State, his nation and its flag. 

The railroad has swept him out of his blizzard- 
bound isolation. He has become an inveterate trav- 
eler during the idle winter months, visiting the cities 
of his own and other States, far and near, like an 
invading army, hale, hearty and prosperous. Last 
year the average income of the North Dakota family 
was larger than in any other State of the Union. 

It was in this region that a Norwegian farmer 
observed to the station agent at Grand Forks: 

"When does this train go?" 

The agent asked: 

" Where do you want to go? " 
92 



The Magnet of the Wheat 



" I don't give a ," was the cheerful reply. 

" Give me a ticket. I just want to take a ride." 

Compared with the story of the previous genera- 
tion, the process of peopling this prairie belt seems 
to be marvelously swift and productive. Compared 
with the future of such areas as this, the present is 
only a crude beginning. For a hundred million 
Americans can be sustained without increasing the 
area of a single farm now under cultivation in this 
country, merely by more intelligent farming. When 
fully developed, the agricultural resources in sight 
will sustain a thousand million souls, more than ten 
times the present population. 

To-day more than forty million Americans live on 
almost six million farms. One bread-winner in every 
three is a farmer. But from the Missouri to the 
Pacific the population averages only three persons 
to the square mile. Disregarding the increasing 
yields that will be reaped from arable lands by raising 
the standards of agriculture, the irrigation projects 
now planned will support an additional population 
of twenty-five millions on land now called outcast. 
The pralrle-settler and town-builder, therefore, pic- 
ture a passing phase, a chapter In a titanic evolution 
whose goal is not yet in sight. 



93 



CHAPTER VII 

*'JIM" HILL AND THE RECONSTRUCTED FARMER 

This part of the Northwest is " Jim " Hill's coun- 
try; he helped to make it what it is, and he is proud 
of it. The settling of the Dakota prairie is typical 
of the work he has been doing from Minnesota to 
Puget Sound. The power of such a man as E. H. 
Harriman consists in his genius for reaching out and 
absorbing the work that other men have wrought. 
He is a product of ultra-modern business conditions, 
a bold strategist in the world of combinations of 
material wealth, typifying the spirit which most 
threatens the social future of the Republic. James 
J. Hill stands largely for the creative and independent 
forces that have hammered a great nation from a 
wilderness. Combined with the ability of a great 
upbuilder he possesses also the genius of the financier 
and the " captain of industry," so that other men 
have not been able to snatch his own from him. 

This sturdy, shaggy, patriarchal-looking man, who 
began life as a Mississippi River " mud " clerk, and 
was later in charge of a train of creaking ox-carts 
that trailed north along the Red River Valley into 
Winnipeg, still lectures the people of his territory 
as if he were in truth the Moses that had led them 
into the promised land. They may scold at his 

94 



" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 

freight schedules, but they turn out by the thousands 
to hear him preach the doctrine of the farm as the 
bulwark of the nation. No county fair in Montana 
or Washington is too unimportant for him to omit 
in his tours of the Northwest. A farmer himself, 
he passes judgment on the prize pigs, fruit and poul- 
try, with a discerning eye, and now and then Is 
moved to relate such trying missionary experiences 
as this : 

" In the summer of twenty years ago, In this State, 
no rain fell from seed-time until the first of July. The 
grain was barely alive and promised no more than 
half a crop. I didn't know as much as I do now, and 
I thought I would help the farmers of the State so 
that they would not have to depend on one crop. In 
my Innocence I thought that they would take advan- 
tage of a chance to improve their stock. So I brought 
out from England and Scotland eight hundred thor- 
oughbred bulls, and distributed them through Minne- 
sota and South and North Dakota. What did the 
farmers do with these costly animals? Breed from 
them and improve their herds? No; they sold them 
for what they could get. I gave them pigs, and they 
killed them In the fall and made winter pork of them. 
This Is what they did with the prize pigs that I 
imported from the old country and for which I had 
paid as much as three hundred dollars a head. 

" These farmers were misled by a lot of dema- 
gogues, fellows who care no more about the farmer 

95 



The Greater America 



than about the wind that whistles. They told the 
farmers that I was trying to cast aspersions on the 
great wheat-raising State of Minnesota by buying the 
best stock I could find and distributing it without 
price." 

Mr. Hill is a prophet who has reaped honor in 
his own country. He believes that agriculture must 
be the foundation of this country's material future, 
and that the iron and coal and timber, and the indus- 
tries depending on them, will begin to fail in another 
generation. And because he is a good American, 
with his country's interests at heart, he loses no chance 
to tell the people of the great western farming 
regions such sledge-hammer truths as these : 

" Remember that your gold mine will never be 
exhausted. As long as this frontier soil remains, it 
will turn out more money than the richest mines of 
Alaska or anywhere else. Cultivate it well, preserve 
your inheritance. Keep your children on the farm 
and make Intelligent men and women of them, and 
the agricultural population of this nation always will 
compare favorably with any other in every quality 
that goes to make good citizenship. They have their 
full share of intelligence, and they have more than 
their share of patriotism. The farmer, if he knows 
it, is the most independent man in the world. The 
only consolation I get anywhere is when I go out on 
the farm and feel — ' Well, here I can raise hogs, 
horses and cattle.' Let me urge you not to get rid 

96 



" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 

of your farm. Keep the roof over the heads of your 
children ; hand it down to them as home. They will 
be better off; they will be better citizens." 

" Since the close of the war, in 1865, the enormous 
territory west of the Mississippi has grown from 
frontier settlements into great, populous, wealthy 
States. One-half the population of the United States 
Is occupied directly or indirectly in the cultivation of 
the land, and fully one-half of the entire capital of 
the country is invested in farms and their buildings, 
and when we come to the questions of intelligence, 
patriotism and good citizenship, the agricultural 
population stands out to-day as the great sheet anchor 
of the nation. The wealth of the world comes from 
the farm, the forest, the mine and the sea. The 
farm has from the beginning been the foundation of 
our growing wealth and greatness. For the first time 
in the history of this country thousands of farmers 
from Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin 
and Minnesota are seeking homes in the Canadian 
Northwest, because of the cheap lands offered in that 
country. I feel sure that no one here to-night ever 
expected to see the time when farmers and farmers' 
sons from the best States of the West would be forced 
to leave their country and their flag, to seek homes 
In a foreign country. Land without population is a 
wilderness; a population without land is a mob." 

One of the striking features of the last Minne- 
sota State Fair was a " Pioneer Building " made of 

97 



The Greater America 



logs and filled with relics of the primitive times of 
the earlier settlers in the regions round about. Above 
this log cabin waved the flag of the nation and 
through the doors passed hundreds of gray-haired 
men and women who could recall to one another 
the days when they were helping to tame wilderness 
territory for this flag of theirs, with the peaceful 
weapons of the farmer and the lumberman. Inside 
the cabin these reunited pioneers found such rude fur- 
niture and household gear as had scantily equipped 
their own log homes in the clearings, and they mar- 
veled anew at the transformation wrought during 
their generation. 

When I happened to pass this building there stood 
in front of it an automobile from which disembarked 
a Dakota farmer and his family. The contrast was 
immensely significant. In the march of progress 
from the log cabin in the clearing, and the sod house 
and shack of the prairie, to the automobile, the party 
telephone line and the steam-threshing outfit, the 
American farmer has brought himself abreast of the 
times in characteristically American fashion. In the 
past he was the poorest, the most hard-workmg and 
most indispensable member of the community, but he 
is rapidly learning that science and system must 
everywhere supplant those clumsy and wasteful 
methods which made him rather the serf than the lord 
of the soil. 

One must go into this western country to find the 
98 



" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 

farmer in his rightful place as the right arm of his 
country's prosperity and its most useful citizen. I 
have visited county and State fairs along the Atlantic 
seaboard where the exhibits of prize stock and 
produce and the implements of husbandry seemed 
to be no more than annexes of the trotting track, the 
balloon ascensions, the " Midway " and other spectac- 
ular frivolities. This impeachment could not be laid 
against this typical western fair, which might have 
comfortably tucked away a half dozen similar exhi- 
bitions in the eastern States. 

It was first of all a gathering place for thousands 
upon thousands of farmers and their families from 
Minnesota and Wisconsin and the Dakotas. They 
came to enjoy themselves in a fat harvest year, with 
money to be cheerfully spent; but they came also to 
see the latest wrinkles of invention and discovery 
relating to their business. 

There were acres and acres of agricultural ma- 
chines in tumultuous operation, puffing and clanking 
and ratthng as if they were suddenly possessed of a 
myriad devils, every one of them eager to show 
the critical onlooker that it was needed on every well- 
regulated farm or ranch. By hundreds the visitors 
crowded around these exhibits, quick to grasp the 
value of every new device that meant time and labor 
saved, ready to throw an old-fashioned machine on 
the scrap-heap if it was not keeping up with the 
rapid pace of improvement. 

99 



The Greater America 



Here was a new corn-binder which cuts and binds 
the cornstalks into bundles, with a shocker to work 
in partnership, so that one man and a team can har- 
vest seven or nine acres of corn in a day. And after 
fifty years of experiment and failure here was at last 
displayed a machine for picking the ears of corn, 
husking them and throwing them into a wagon, so 
that one man can gather as much corn in half an hour 
as he could pick by hand in half a day. Hay is not 
only cut and raked with machines, but carried into 
the barn by a hay-loader, and pitched into the mow 
by an automatic fork. In one of these western 
farms a hundred and twenty tons of hay have been 
put into the mow by these machines in four hours of 
a summer afternoon. The gasoline engine was on 
deck in dozens of shapes, devised to pump the farm- 
er's water, shell his corn, grind his feed, saw his wood, 
run his feed-cutter, churn his butter or haul his grain. 

In regions where the scarcity of labor is the farm- 
er's most harassing problem, he is keenly on the 
lookout for machinery which, at small cost, will do 
the work of a dozen or twenty men. Therefore he 
goes to his State fair with something more in mind 
than " having a good time." 

As the business of farming becomes more and 
more diversified, the transition affects the people of 
the vast regions of the West In a greater degree 
than the Easterner can realize. In the Dakotas the 
bonanza wheat farm already belongs with a past 

lOO 



" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 

era. It is spectacular to see twenty plows march- 
ing abreast over miles of open country, or whole 
squadrons of reapers and threshers at work on one 
farm. But, hke the cowboy, the owner of the huge 
wheat farm was a foe to the upbuilding and peopling 
of his region. His vast tracts are being cut into 
small farms, and towns and communities spring up, 
linked by good roads and telephones, where the bare 
prairie swept for miles and miles untenanted except 
during the brief season of sowing and harvesting. 

The " wheat king " is a vanishing American, along 
with the " cattle king." And It is the women of the 
western prairies, who rejoice that the farmer is driv- 
ing out the wheat-raiser. The wife of a Dakota 
farmer was talking of this coming of new and better 
conditions which are removing the grave social men- 
ace of the huge horde of harvest hands that must 
be collected to harvest the wheat crop. 

" The greatest peril to family life in this section," 
said she, " is exclusive wheat-raising, with its long 
periods of comparative idleness alternating with 
weeks of spasmodic labor, when all the family work 
to exhaustion, taking into their household " hobo " 
harvest hands, four-fifths of whom are moral lepers. 
On a farm near here where formerly nothing but 
wheat was grown, ten men were picked up in the 
streets of Fargo to help handle the harvest. Eight 
of them turned out to be criminals or drunkards, 
whose language reeked of the vilest slums. The 

lOI 



The Greater America 



foreman said he would be glad to discharge the 
drunken brutes, but It was either hire such men as 
these or have no help to cut and thresh a thousand 
acres of wheat. A few years later I visited that farm, 
and commented on the fine, Intelligent-looking lot of 
men employed. None of them drank, nor was there 
any profanity or quarreling. ' They are as good as 
they look,' said my host. ' Any one of them could 
manage a farm of his own, and every man of them Is 
saving money with that end In view.' 

" ' How In the world can you get such men as 
these?' I asked. 'What has revolutionized your 
farm ? ' 

" ' The three " P's," pigs, poultry and potatoes,' 
was the answer. ' We are no longer exclusively 
wheat-growers, and, having continuous employment 
for them, we can afford to hire our men by the year. 
Some of these men have been with me for three 
years, and my boys and girls are no longer in danger 
of being ruined by the hoboes that the wheat-raiser 
must hire or do without labor. What makes possible 
the many slum saloons that dot Minnesota border 
towns? Who make up four-fifths of the population 
of our jails and almshouses? The hobo. What 
brings him here? The wheat farm. And there you 
are. The moral tone of the whole grain-raising 
West is improving because of the diversified farming, 
a feature of American progress which is often over- 
looked.' " 

I02 



" Jim " Hill and the Reconstructed Farmer 

It was on another of these wheat farms, with the 
nearest neighbor four miles away, that the five-year- 
old youngster, tired of gazing at the dreary expanse 
of wintry stubble, observed to his mother: 

" Don't you think some of us will be sick pretty 
soon, I mean real sick? I'd be willing to swallow the 
very bitterest medicine, if the doctor would only 
come. I get so tired of seeing just us all the time." 



103 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LAST OF THE OPEN RANGE 

The Nogales Oasis of a recent date contained 
this paragraph, which may be called an Arizona 
obituary: 

" The round-up In the Oro Blanco country last 
week was like a funeral procession. Even the 
horses knew there was something wrong, and went 
about their work with a shameless lack of spirit. 
Occasionally an outlaw cayuse would throw up his 
head and emit a loud horse laugh. Men who for 
years had ridden the range with the dash of cen- 
taurs and a bearing of defiance to all the world 
sat as still and stiff in their saddles as mutton- 
chopped Britishers, and with faces as solemn. For 
there was not a gun or a holster In the outfit. The 
edict had gone forth that the round-ups would here- 
after be regarded as public gatherings, and the law 
of Arizona forbids the carrying of weapons at ' pub- 
lic gatherings.' " 

Such signs of the times confirm the common Impres- 
sion that the cow-man of the " open range " Is a part 
of a picturesque American past, a lost hero with a 
vanished occupation. It Is true that In the South- 
west the barbed-wire fence has almost wiped out the 
characteristic life of the old " cow outfit." The 

104 



The Last of the Open Range 

empire of Texas Is already checkered with grazing 
ranches, some of them hundreds of thousands of 
acres In area, but nevertheless they are pastures, 
privately bounded and owned. And the cattle towns 
of Texas, Arizona, Kansas and the " Indian Na- 
tions " have been Invaded and filled with a new 
prosperity by the prosaic farmer, the manufacturer, 
and the small rancher. 

The era, when half a million long-horned cattle 
drifted north every year to the Dakotas and Mon- 
tana, convoyed by an army of the finest horsemen the 
world ever saw, was long ago wiped out by the rail- 
road. The time when the Texas steer roamed as 
free as the buffalo, and the men who rode with him 
knew no law or boundaries save those of their own 
making, will never come again. They belonged with 
the earliest stages of civilization. It was Inevitable 
that on the heels of the nomad, pastoral age of this 
country's growth should follow the agricultural. 

But It Is not true that the open range has wholly 
vanished. Its life still runs wide and free. The 
heroic bigness of It, however. Is to be sought no 
longer In the Southwest, where the cowboy has been 
most often framed In story. He Is making his last 
stand In northern Montana, where I found him In the 
fall " round-up " soon after I left the wheat-covered 
prairie and the amazingly new towns of North 
Dakota. If you lay a ruler across the map of Mon- 
tana, east and west, from Fort Buford to Fort 

105 



The Greater America 



Benton, it will not cross a town in a line of three hun- 
dred miles long. If you run the line north and south, 
say midway between Malta and Glasgow, from up on 
the Canadian boundary down almost to the Yellow- 
stone, a stretch of one hundred and fifty miles will be 
covered without finding a settlement big enough to 
deserve a dot and a name on the map. 

This is, roughly speaking, the country of the last 
great open range in the United States. Its area is 
greater than the combined extent of Connecticut, 
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New 
Jersey and Delaware. It is not so thickly populated 
that men are in danger of jostling one another. 

It includes, for example, Dawson County, which is 
bigger than the State of Maryland. There are two 
million people in Maryland; there are twenty-five 
hundred in Dawson County, Montana. While one 
hundred and sixty persons inhabit the average square 
mile of Maryland, every man, woman and child in 
Dawson county has five square miles. 

Valley County covers more real estate than Con- 
necticut and Massachusetts. The two New England 
States have about four million population. Valley 
County holds the magnificent total of forty-five hun- 
dred people, including an Indian Reservation in which 
you could lose the State of Delaware. 

Three things have kept this range open into the 
twenty century: the climate, the grass and the lack 
of population. But the climate and the soil, which 

io6 



The Last of the Open Range 

supplies the finest grazing in the world, are the fac- 
tors that are bringing so swift a tide of population 
into this country that the finish of the old-time cattle 
man and his methods is plainly in sight. Even now 
he is making ready to quit. Within the next three 
or four years the surviving " outfits " will have 
shipped their last cattle to market from the open 
range of northern Montana. The march of civiliza- 
tion which overtook them in the Southwest was 
delayed a few more years up in the North, but its 
vanguard is closing in from all sides. The final 
" clean-up " is now in progress. 

I counted myself as rarely fortunate in being able 
to witness both the old and the new conditions as 
spread out side by side. On the one hand were the 
wagons of the round-up camp and the white dust 
clouds that marked the " cutting" of the herds; on 
the other a meeting of farmers to discuss with the 
engineers of the Government Reclamation Service 
Irrigation plans whereby scores of thousands of acres 
of grazing land were to be watered and planted in 
hay, wheat and alfalfa. 

The dusty, sweating cowboys, picked survivors of 
the lost legion, some of them looking back to a quar- 
ter century of life on the open ranges, were being 
driven from their last battle ground by the plodding 
farmer in overalls and straw hat, who preferred rais- 
ing grain to raising hell. 

The "cow-punchers" were reading the handwriting 
107 



The Greater America 



on the wall. Those of a prudent habit of mind had 
begun to pick up their own bunches of cattle, and 
to stock small ranches scattered here and there on 
both sides of the Missouri. Some of them were even 
making desultory studies of the hitherto despised 
agricultural outlook for an honest man unafraid of 
toil. Others were planning to return to their native 
Texas, and with their old employers look after the 
modern steer that is " raised by hand " in a pasture 
and wintered on hay and alfalfa. 

It was indeed a meeting of old trails and new, a 
cross-section of America in the making even more 
sharply contrasting than the panorama of the North 
Dakota prairie. 

The history of the northern range throws back 
to the end of the Civil War, when the plains of Texas 
were covered with millions of cattle for which there 
was no outlet to market. The rapid settlement of 
the Middle West created a demand for these Texas 
herds, and a trail was opened into Kansas. Besides 
finding a new market, it was discovered that southern 
cattle wintered In the country to the northward gained 
in weight and fatness at an amazing rate. Nature 
favored breeding in Texas, where in good seasons 
almost every cow had her calf, but beef cattle grew 
lean and rangy. Therefore they were sent north to 
fatten, and the trail of the Texas cowboy gradually 
extended up into Montana and the Dakotas. 

He found a country favored above all others for 
io8 



The Last of the Open Range 

making big, fine cattle of his angular Texas steers. 
The buffalo had learned this centuries before, when 
it chose this area for its winter and summer pasture. 
As the buffalo dwindled the cattle increased, until in 
the greatest year of the " drive " nearly a million 
cattle were moved across country from Texas, and 
with them went four thousand men and thirty thou- 
sand horses. 

This was in 1884, by which time the buffalo had 
vanished from the range. Its bones were being gath- 
ered and shipped for fertilizer by the carload. It 
has been estimated that before 1890 the bones of 
seven million buffalo had been shipped from points 
in North Dakota alone. The range was swept clean 
for the cattle man. The Indians were rounded up on 
reservations. The settler had steered clear of these 
vast northern plains, which were believed to be too 
arid for farming. But the buffalo grass and the blue- 
joint supplied not only rich grazing in summer, but 
standing hay, cured by nature, that sustained cattle 
on the range through the blizzard-swept winters. 

As the railroad crept north and south, the Texas 
outfits trailed part of the northward journey and 
shipped their steers over the remainder of the dis- 
tance. Year by year, as the trail shortened and the 
railroads extended, the " drive " dwindled, until the 
steel highway stretched from Texas to Billings, Mon- 
tana. But the cattle continued to stream north by the 
all-rail route, and this movement has been in full tide 

109 



The Greater America 



for more than fifteen years. From thirty to fifty 
thousand cattle of one brand were thus transplanted 
to be " finished oft" " for market on the Montana 
range. 

North Dakota has become covered with wheat, 
which has steadily moved westward, eating more and 
more into the open range. Already the wheat has 
spread a hundred miles west beyond the climatic limit 
assigned it ten years ago, and now irrigation has 
joined forces with " dry land farming." Another 
reason for the downfall of the " cow-man " in Mon- 
tana was his own short-sightedness in failing to safe- 
guard his future. His herds must have water, and 
the range is useless without it. The outposts of the 
farming and ranching invasion got possession of the 
springs and water holes by purchase and homestead 
right. 

But away with these epitaphs and this death-chant 
of the cow-puncher! He was still on the Montana 
range in all his glory in the autumn of 1905, and 
there is work for him to do before he has rounded up 
his last beef herd in this fenceless land of billowing 
plain, butte and mountain. In the crystalline air of this 
illimitable out-of-doors. Three big outfits, a dozen 
to twenty men to a camp, were slowly working In 
from the Little Rockies, when a Great Northern 
express dropped me off at Malta, a famous old 
cow-town, which Is still busy and occasionally even 
tempestuous. So simple an act as swinging off the 

no 



The Last of the Open Range 

platform of a sleeping car was to step into a different 
world of men and conditions from that left behind. 

On all sides of the little town lay the glorious 
sweep of untamed country. To find another railroad 
to the northward was to ride a hundred and fifty miles 
to the Canadian Pacific; to find a railroad to the 
southward meant as long a ride to the Northern 
Pacific. On the edge of the town a freighters' outfit 
was making ready to pull out four days to a camp 
near the Little Rockies. Ten horses led the string 
of laden wagons, behind which trailed the covered 
chuck-wagon, equipped for sleeping and cooking, for 
there were no hotels on this route. 

The boss and his two helpers were wrestling with 
a broncho which, until this ill-fated day, had never 
felt a harness across his back. He was needed as 
an off-wheeler, and he had to go. He fought like a 
hero possessed of seven devils, and three men toiled 
for an hour to get him into the traces and to keep 
clear from his infernally active heels. 

At length his nine comrades jumped into their col- 
lars, and the rebel simply had to go with them. He 
lay down and was dragged on his ear until his addled 
wits perceived there was nothing in this sort of 
mutiny. He rose and slid stiff-legged until, out- 
numbered, outvoted and outgeneraled, he surged into 
the collar like a thunderbolt and thereafter tried to 
pull the whole load, in the vain hope of tearing some- 
thing out by the roots. 

Ill 



The Greater America 



The long string of horses and wagons wound out 
into the open country, and in a little while dipped 
across a grassy undulation and was gone. A swirl of 
dust marked its progress for several miles, — this 
plodding caravan, with its tanned and bearded men, 
unlettered and slow of speech, used to living out 
under the sky, seeing few of their kind. It was thus 
the pioneers crossed the plains a half century ago. 

Akin to this episode in its portrayal of conditions 
which are all but crowded out of this twentieth cen- 
tury, was the aspect of the plain that rolled sheer to 
the horizon from another side of Malta. Fogged 
in white alkali dust, five thousand cattle were eddy- 
ing and drifting into scattered herds. They were 
not grazing at random. Along the fringes of the 
piebald masses mounted mea were outlined at rest 
on the crest of the rising ground, or racing headlong 
into the dust clouds. 

What looked like confusion was system, skill and 
daring. Nearer vision showed the cow-punchers at 
work " cutting " the cattle for shipment. They were 
in the midst of the fall round-up. As with a drag- 
net, plain and coulee and butte and river bottom had 
been swept within a hundred miles radius to sift out 
and bring in the steers that were ready for market. 

Fat and sleek and " rollicky " from the summer's 
grazing, the cattle were hard to handle. It was a 
field for the display of the craft of man and horse. 
These were no farmers transformed into cow-hands 

112 



The Last of the Open Range 

by the gift of a rope and a pair of " chaps." Almost 
every man had been bred in the business from boy- 
hood. A big steer boked from the ruck, and shot 
across the prairie, tail in air. There streaked after 
him, hell-for-leather, a wizened man half lost in a 
pair of " chaps " with the fur on. He wore a pair of 
goggles and a little beard which was white, not all 
with dust. Old, but spare and sinewy, riding his 
cow-pony like a wild Indian, he might have stood for 
a picture of " The Last of the Cowboys." 

The runaway steer could not move quick enough 
to dodge the wise pony and the dare-devil rider. 
When the fugitive had been turned after a breathless 
chase, the old man galloped back to search out 
another steer with his brand on its flank somewhere 
in the smother of cattle and dust. He pulled up to 
wipe his goggles, and the wrinkled parchment of his 
swarthy cheek confirmed the surmise that he was a 
veteran of the veterans. 

*' I guess you won't find 'em riding much older 
than me," he said. " Most all the old-timers on the 
range knows Doc Thompson. I began punching cat- 
tle in '72 and I'm still hard at it. I'm too old to learn 
a new trade. When this range is cleaned up, I reckon 
I'll have to try what I can do riding herd on a cabbage 
patch or a likely bunch of potatoes." 

His very fashion of " cutting " cattle showed that 
he was an old-timer. Everything was done with a 
rush and a hurrah. His pony was either at rest or 

113 



The Greater America 



on the dead run. There were no half-way measures. 
When he picked out a steer he went after it on the 
jump, nor thought it worth while to reckon whether 
he ran a pound or two of beef off an animal so long 
as he got there in a gorgeous hurry. The golden age 
when he helped " shoot up " towns for diversion had 
passed. But in his impetuous manner and his reckless 
riding there was the flavor of the ruder time that 
bred him and his kind. 

Of a sterling type, but less flamboyant, was the 
dark-visaged, black-mustached foreman of the Mil- 
ner outfit, " Bill " Jaycox, than whom you must travel 
far to find a better cow-man. Before some of the 
precocious wizards of finance who dwell in eastern 
sky-scrapers were weaned, he was outfitting pack 
trains for troopers of Uncle Sam who were fighting 
Indians in the Bad Lands and along the Missouri. 
He used to break In and outfit the creaking trains of 
bull-carts that trailed out of Fort Benton when it 
was the city of the Northwest, and the head of 
navigation on the Missouri. He rode the trail with 
herds of Texas cattle moving to the northern range 
ahead of the railroad. He has a wife and babies and 
a ranch tucked away In a smiling Montana valley, 
and he will be ready to quit the range " when the 
range quits him." 

" Bill " Jaycox and his comrades are of the kind 
bred wholly by American conditions, whose like will 
not happen often on the farms and in the cities that 

114 



The Last of the Open Range 

will cover the ranges they rode. Such old-time cow- 
men as these are vanishing exemplars of the gospel 
of elemental manhood, standing on its two feet, 
wholly apart from the complex scheme of existence 
which hems in its neighbors. The destiny of the 
farmer is coupled with the factories that turn out his 
tilling and harvesting machinery. The sailor is help- 
less without steam in the boilers, and firemen and 
engineers in the hold. But give the cowboy his horse, 
his saddle, his slicker, his rope and his six-shooter, 
and he will do his work, man to man, asking no odds. 
He is crude and he must go, but he is honest and 
brave and loyal, which qualities are not guaranteed 
by such trumpeted factors of " progress " as elec- 
tricity, telephones, and great life insurance companies. 

From sunrise to dusk the three outfits outside of 
Malta sifted the uneasy herds, stopping only at noon 
to ride back to their camps in the hills, eat dinner, 
change horses and return to their task. Shipping 
could not begin till next morning at daybreak. 
Therefore, when the sun dropped low in the cloudless 
sky, the herds moved slowly toward the nearest water 
hole, and the weary outfits scattered toward their 
camps. 

One bunch of cattle was waiting its turn for water, 
and two men were left as the first watch of the night 
herd until they could be relieved for supper. The 
spare, bent figure of old " Doc " Thompson, on his 
motionless pony, was outlined against the reddening 

115 



The Greater America 



sky. In front of him were the quiet cattle, beginning 
to " bed down " on the grass. The pose of the old 
man as he dropped forward a little in his saddle, his 
hands clasped on the horn had a certain indefinable 
pathos. He seemed to signify more than merely a 
cow-hand tired after a day of hard riding. The 
passing of the virile and rugged youth of the nation 
was suggested in the silhouette he made against the 
sunset sky. Then the roar of a train came over the 
plains. Its lights went by like shooting stars and 
vanished in the paling west. The spirit of the new 
civilization was sweeping across the last of the open 
range. 



ii6 



CHAPTER IX 

JACK TEAL AND SOME OTHERS 

That night the cow-punchers took possession of 
Malta. They had been three weeks on the round-up, 
and they rode into town hke homing pigeons. It 
may cause disappointment to record that, while a 
considerable amount of whisky was absorbed, nobody 
was killed, and most of the bar-room lights were 
intact at midnight. 

A group of cattle-owners planted their chairs on 
the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Every man of 
the half dozen counted his cattle by thousands In 
Texas and Montana. The least prosperous of the 
company could have rounded up a million dollars' 
worth of beef on the hoof if he were put to it. But 
you could not have found among them all a grain 
of the " bluff " and money worship and straining 
pretense that surges nightly through the corridors 
of the Waldorf-Astoria. 

After a while there joined them a stocky man 
whose garb was not only careless, but seemed to 
speak of poverty. A dusty handkerchief was around 
his collarless neck. His shapeless trousers were 
tucked into dustier boots, and his slouch hat looked 
as if it had been stamped on by a cayuse. His 

117 



TJie Greater America 



manner was almost shy, as if he were nobody and 
painfully aware of that depressing fact. After he 
had passed on, one of the group carelessly observed : 

"Of course, I naturally despise sheep. But the 
sheep-man is ace high in this country. We're all 
back numbers. The cow-man is in the discard for 
fair. Look at Ben Phillips, there, who just loafed 
up. He has some cattle, and he shipped fifteen hun- 
dred head this year. There's between sixty and 
seventy thousand dollars as his cattle rake-off for the 
season. But that isn't a marker to what he's doing 
with sheep. Why, his wool alone will fetch him a 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars this year. And 
he has ten thousand lambs. There's twenty-five thou- 
sand more. I figure that his cash income this year 
is well past the two hundred thousand dollar mark. 
Isn't that enough to make you sore on sheep-men? 
He carries about twenty-five thousand sheep, he tells 
me. He has forty thousand acres fenced for them 
on one range. And I remember when Ben Phillips 
moved from the Judith Basin to the north side of 
the Missouri eleven years ago with less than ten 
thousand sheep." 

A cowboy came out of the nearest bar-room, flung 
a leg over his pony, drove home both spurs and 
clattered up street, singing at the top of his lungs. 
One of the owners was moved to remark with 
reminiscent chuckle : 

" It seems tame in Malta, but it's not so very long 
ii8 







/M 



\^ ^'J 







Jack Teal and Some Others 



ago that Jack Teal held up the whole town for half 
a day because his feelings had been hurt. Before 
the hotel was built we stockmen used to sleep in a 
log house, In a line between the row of saloons and 
the dance halls. This put us under a cross fire, for 
the cow-punchers In the saloons had a cheerful habit 
of emptying their guns at the dance-hall windows 
and vice versa. I was writing letters one night when 
my foreman came in and said: 

" ' I hate to bother you, but Jack Teal is getting 
mad, and he says he's liable to be real mad if things 
go on. And as he's in the saloon just in front here, I 
reckon you want to know when to dodge when the 
shooting gets wild. Jack does seem irritated. A 
sheep-herder accused him of stealing a bundle of 
coyote pelts. And Jack didn't like it, of course, and 
to show his contempt for sheep-men, he up and bit 
off the sheep-herder's ear. Another sheep-man chips 
in to help his partner, and Jack sails in and bites off 
his ear, to show that he Is more contemptuous than 
ever. It does look to me as if he might get real mad 
after a while.' 

" The foreman had made a conservative report. 
Jack was ' getting mad.' Three soundly whipped 
sheep-men were wiping the blood from their features, 
and starting out to swear out a warrant for Jack's 
arrest. They were gone for some time, but were 
unable to find a marshal or deputy daring enough 
to arrest Jack when he was ' Irritated.' 

119 



The Greater America 



" Whereupon, the justice of the peace, a strap- 
ping big Scotchman, said he'd serve the papers him- 
self. He coUided with Jack, and when the smoke 
cleared, Jack had Justice on the floor and badly bat- 
tered. 

" It must have been about this time that Jack 
decided that he was ' real mad ' over the way he was 
treated in Malta. He rode out to camp, no one ven- 
turing to annoy his sensitive temperament as he gal- 
loped through the street. An hour later I rode out 
to camp with my foreman. The moonlight was 
bright, and about half-way we met Jack coming back 
to town. He was about as alarming a sight as I ever 
bumped into. He had it in for the wide, wide world, 
for he reined up twenty feet from me, threw down 
his Winchester, wobbling it square and fair at my 
manly chest. His finger was fooling most carelessly 
with the trigger as he remarked with deadly deliber- 
ation: 

" ' I ain't quite sure whether I ought to kill you 
or not.' 

" He thought I was coming out to arrest him, and 
we argued the point for several minutes, while that 
fool gun was held on my heart. At length Jack 
let the gun drop with seeming reluctance, and rode 
on to town. There he proceeded to shoot at every 
head that showed. The stores and saloons put up 
their shutters and all business was suspended. Jack 
took a commanding position in the main street and 

I20 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



put in several enjoyable hours taking pop-shots at 
every man who dared emerge from cover. Malta 
was put out of commission. Tiring of this amuse- 
ment, or running out of ammunition, he rode back 
to camp. 

" I met him next morning, and he looked mighty 
ashamed of himself. I gave him the devil of a lec- 
ture, not so much about his general line of conduct, 
as his shocking practice of biting off the ears of 
people who disagreed with him. He took it to heart 
and promised he would never do it again, and he 
kept his word. I asked with some indignation : 

" * What did you mean by holding me up, the 
best friend you've got ? ' 

" His only comment was eminently characteristic: 
" ' Well, you stood it d — n well, Mr. Milner.' " 
While we smoked and talked there dismounted in 
front of the hotel this same Jack Teal, dusty from 
long and lonely riding, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, 
almost diffident of manner. When we had adjourned 
to the bar, and Jack had ordered a " dust-cutter " 
to sluice the alkali from his throat, one of the com- 
pany asked him : 

" Anything doing? " 

Teal rubbed his stubbled chin and replied: 

" Nothing much. I've been out with George Hall, 

the stock detective. I'm working for Ben Phillips, 

the sheep-man, just now. Somebody's been cutting 

his fences. I'm watching the fences and trying to 

121 



The Greater America 



ketch up with the parties. There may be something 
doing then. 

"What was I doing with George Hall? Last 
week he cuts the trail of a human coyote that's run- 
ning off a bunch of stolen horses. This rustler is 
heading for the boundary, and when George gets the 
word he rides into Glasgow to dig up the sheriff, 
and get a warrant and make the play all proper. He 
couldn't find the sheriff, and not wanting to cut loose 
alone, in case of accident, he rounds me up and asks 
me to go along. I'm out of the deputy business, 
being paid to ride fence for Ben Phillips, but being 
anxious to oblige an old friend, I says: 

" ' All right, George. Count me in. Where is 
this rustler of yours? ' 

" My Winchester is in the saddle boot as usual, 
and the pair of us trails out north, until we swing a 
circle that fetches a few miles to the south of Malta. 
The rustler is laying up to rest his stock, and we 
get the word that he's camped near a coulee when we 
picket our ponies for the night. George tells me : 

" ' Now, Jack, there ain't going to be no killing 
in this. We'll jump him at daylight while he's in 
his blankets and tie him up and pack him back to 
Glasgow smooth and easy.' 

" ' I don't want no killing,' says I, ' but this party 
may want to do some shooting of his own, George, 
and we don't take no chances.' 

" At the first crack of daylight we walk ahead, 

122 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



and sights the horse-thief rolled up in his blankets 
with a tarpaulin over his head. I pulls down on him 
with my Winchester and George with his six-shooter, 
and we calls, ' Throw up your hands.' 

" He sits up and blinks and puts 'em over his head, 
and while I covers him, George invites him to step 
out and be searched. While George is going over 
him, I goes through his bed and digs out a rifle and 
two six-shooters. The rustler takes it quiet and nice, 
and asks to walk over and get his best horse, which 
is grazing about twenty yards away toward the mouth 
of the coulee, saddled up over night. 

" It looks like a safe play, for we have him covered 
plenty. I notice that as Mr. Rustler edges over to 
his horse, he ain't aiming to catch him. He don't 
go at it right. Instead of steering to get his horse 
by the picket rope and head him round to camp, he 
sort of ambles behind the pony's tail, slow and easy, 
and the horse naturally walks on ahead of him. They 
are drifting toward the coulee a step at a time, and 
I says to George: 

" ' He ain't acting like he wants to ketch that 
cayuse and lead him back into camp. He's coaxing 
him away for a break up the coulee.' 

" George laughs, and don't allow the rustler Is 
planning any such foolish play as that. 

" Just then, Mr. Rustler makes a dash for it, 
climbs his horse, and is off, up the coulee, at top 
speed. We make a jump for our horses, and the 

123 



The Greater America 



thief has a good flying start of a couple of hundred 
yards, and he's on a fresh horse. 

" ' Throw up them hands, or there'll be a killing,' 
yells George. 

" Mr. Rustler never looks back, but he lays out 
along that horse's back and is certainly burning the 
wind. George gets away ahead of me, and we're 
making tracks, the three of us, over some mighty 
rough country. George has his automatic six- 
shooter, and I has my carbine. I aims to take a 
shot as soon as I can, but I'm up against a funny 
proposition. 

" George is riding between me and the rustler, we 
three being strung out in pretty near a straight line. 
I don't want to plug my friend, but I'm anxious to 
get a shot at the gent ahead of him. After a little 
while the thief swings a slight curve to keep up along 
the bottom of the coulee, and I see his pony's nose 
poke out no more than a foot ahead of George. 
There was just room to throw the sight on the rus- 
tler's horse, and a chance of getting him through the 
head. We were on the dead jump, and I couldn't 
see more than eight inches of the farther horse in 
front of George when I turned loose. 

" Being scared that way of hitting George I 
throwed a mite too far ahead, and I saw the bullet 
hit in the bank. It was kind of nervous shooting, 
and I waited again till the rustler weaved ahead a 
mite. This time I had to shoot plumb over George's 

124 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



shoulder, and I wasn't quite easy in my mind. Mis- 
takes are easy that way when you're buck-jumping 
over rocks, and your friend is dead in line with the 
coyote you're aiming to kill. 

" This time, I found it out later, I put the bullet 
plumb into the back of the rustler's saddle. It hit 
a row of iron tacks, turned up, and no more'n bulged 
through the leather seat, just enough to make the 
rustler think he was hit without hurting him none. 
He was some distracted and looked around and felt 
of himself. Meantime George had worked up 
within shooting distance, and throwed loose with his 
six-shooter. The first bullet hit the rustler plumb 
between the shoulders, the second drilled him through 
the brain, and he slid off his pony like a bundle of 
blankets. 

" We slung him across a pony and brung him into 
Glasgow, and that was the end of it. We didn't 
go out to do any killing. It ought not to have been 
necessary, but that rustler was a blank, blank fool. 
For George can shoot some, when he has to." 

Mr. Teal told the story with a modesty which 
overlooked his own nerve and confidence in himself 
when he was shooting within a hair's breadth of 
George Hall. The " Wild West " stars, who shoot 
at glass balls and " faked up " targets with ranges 
all measured, make a spectacular show. But their 
work seems rather commonplace alongside such a 
plain tale as this. 

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" Was George Hall at all nervous when you were 
singeing his whiskers in this fashion? " I asked. 

" No, I guess not," said Jack. " He didn't men- 
tion it none. We've run together a good deal. He 
knows I wasn't going to take no chances of putting 
a bullet into him by any fool mistake." 

It is also worth more than passing mention that 
Mr. George Hall was doing some clean-cut work of 
his own. From a flying horse in a rocky caiion he 
put two bullets into his surging target, at a distance 
of more than a hundred yards, and with a revolver at 
that. 

There was no boastful strain in Jack Teal. He told 
of this episode in the day's work with a tolerant 
air of duty toward entertaining a tenderfoot who for 
some unknown reason seemed absurdly curious about 
the most commonplace affairs. As we sat there, and 
looked through the open door, a Great Northern 
express, bound for the Pacific Coast, boomed past 
the station. Tourists in dining-car and sleeper looked 
out at the sleepy cow-town, and were doubtless say- 
ing to one another: 

" Years ago this was the kind of frontier you 
read about, when the cowboys and bad men and 
six-shooters were busy. It's all gone now, and rid- 
ing across these prairies Is an infernally monotonous 
proceeding." 

Mr. Jack Teal clanked out of the bar, cinched up 
his pony, and made ready to ride fifty miles away 

126 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



on the open range, forty miles from a town, to camp 
in his blanket for two or three weeks. He did not 
say it, but it was known that If he " ketched up " 
with the persons who were cutting Ben Phillips' 
fence, there would be a " killing," nine chances out 
of ten. The West is alleged to be colorless and 
quiet, but it is not unlikely that Mr. Jack Teal will 
die with his boots on in the performance of his 
duty, for he Is a pitcher that has been often to the 
well. 

Another owner from Texas was moved to con- 
tribute another tale of somewhat less recent life on 
the northern range : 

" When I go to Chicago or New York it's hard 
for me to realize that things have not quite simmered 
down to the trolley and asphalt pavement stage of 
life out here on the old trail. For instance, there was 
the round-up of the ' Dutch ' Henry gang of rustlers 
and outlaws only a few years ago, when ' Leather ' 
Griffith and his posse lay fourteen days in the hills 
just north of here, trying to catch the outlaws that 
were hidden somewhere in there. It was In the dead 
of winter, and some of the sheriff's outfit started In 
such a hurry that they had nothing but their blankets. 
They slept in the snow with their saddles under their 
heads, until it was figured out that the ranchmen In 
the hills were passing Information along to the rus- 
tlers, being scared to death at the name of ' Dutch ' 
Henry. 

127 



The Greater America 



" If the word was being passed along ahead of 
them, there was no sense In the posse's staying out any 
longer, so ' Leather ' Griffith called them in. But 
he left two good men behind, George Bird and Jack 
Moran, who stowed themselves away in a coulee and 
came near freezing stiff. But the trick worked. The 
word went through the country that all the sheriff's 
outfit had gone into Glasgow and Malta. 

" After two or three days, Bird and Moran rode 
down to the nearest ranch, and kept their eyes peeled 
to see that nobody broke out to carry information 
to the rustlers. An old man and a boy were the only 
people living at the ranch, and the two visitors told 
them they were out looking up some stray horses. 
The rancher welcomed them, for he was in fear of 
his life, and wanted protection against the rustlers. 
It wasn't more than a day before the boy came run- 
ning into the house, and told the two deputies that 
one of the ' Dutch ' Henry gang was coming in, 
Carlisle, he thought his name was. From description, 
Bird and Moran sized up the stranger as Jones, one 
of the most desperate men of the gang, although 
they could not swear to it. However, the visitor 
walked in, taking it for granted the coast was clear, 
and bumped Into the two deputies, whom he could 
not quite make out. He was suspicious, and they 
were alert for the first move In one of the most 
remarkable plays ever pulled off in the West. 

*' These three men ate supper at the same table, 
128 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



chatting pleasantly, but all hands were keyed up for 
action and ready for the curtain to go up with a 
rush. The evening passed without incident. The 
deputies knew that if their man was Jones, the 
slightest bungle meant a killing. 

" There was only one spare bed, and without 
remark the three men took off their coats and boots 
and piled in together, three in a bed. They lay 
awake all night, side by side, touching elbows, each 
listening for the slightest movement made by one of 
his fellows. Each man had his six-shooter under his 
pillow, his hand on it all the time, it's safe to gamble. 

" This was a situation hard to beat in any novel 
you ever read. The pull on those three sets of 
nerves must have been trying, but nobody batted an 
eyelash, and the trio got up, washed and sat down 
to breakfast. Now this Carlisle, or Jones, sat at the 
head of the table. At his right was the old rancher, 
at his left was the deputy, Moran, and at the foot 
of the table was the boy. Bird offered to wait on 
the table and nobody kicked, so he passed dishes and 
did not sit down. 

" Something was about due to drop. Men can't 
stand that kind of a strain forever. At last George 
Bird staked his life on one throw, and you can bet he 
had figured it pretty carefully during his wakeful 
night. He had it mapped out that, while the outlaw 
was mighty suspicious, he wasn't quite sure, and that 
the quiet and easy twelve hours he had put in with 

129 



The Greater America 



these genial strangers had him some puzzled in his 
mind. This was what Bird banked on, he having a 
keen set of mental works for a deputy. 

" He sauntered over to the wall, took a bag of 
tobacco and papers out of a pocket and began to roll 
a cigarette. This move turned his back square toward 
Jones at the table. The other deputy sized up the 
situation out of one eye, but kept on absorbing bacon 
and beans as If there was nothing doing. 

" Now follows the part of the play that interests 
me most. When Bird deliberately turned his back 
on the outlaw, and Moran didn't even look up, Jones 
figured it that no man really gunning after him would 
give him a chance like that. Bird walked back to 
the table, then turned again, went over to his coat, 
fished out a match, again with his back to the outlaw. 
Moran kept on chatting easy and calm, while his 
partner stood looking out of the window and light- 
ing his cigarette. 

" But as Bird turned toward them, he made a 
lightning swoop with one hand and caught up his 
Winchester carbine that was leaning against a cup- 
board in that corner. This was what he had been 
aiming to do all through his tobacco and cigarette 
play. 

" He threw the carbine down on Jones almost with 
the same motion, and told him to throw up his hands. 
The outlaw made a motion to pull his gun from 
inside the waistband of his trousers, where he had 

130 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



tucked it for breakfast. But Bird was too quick for 
him. He shot twice before Jones could get his six- 
shooter into play, and the outlaw fell off his chair 
against the stove with one bullet through his head 
and another through his lungs. Before he died, he 
muttered : 

" ' I slept In the same bed with the , 

and they shot me down like a dog.' 

" His gun had dropped from his hand, but with 
his last gasp, so Moran told me, his right fore- 
finger was twitching as he tried to pull a trigger that 
wasn't there." 

Next morning we rode out to a cow-camp among 
the hills, after the shipping was over, and the 
" rollicky " Texas cattle and the more unruly natives 
had been driven into the stock-pens and up the shutes 
to the waiting cars. It was good to lie on the grass 
near the cook's tent and the chuck-wagon, and watch 
the cow-punchers come in from their hard and dusty 
task. Now they would ride the range again for two 
weeks, " making the circle " to round up more cattle 
to be driven in for shipment. Two hundred picked 
horses grazed within sight of the camp, to keep fif- 
teen men In fresh mounts during their long circuit 
of several hundred miles after the scattered herds 
that were roaming at their own sweet will. 

The cook was a man of infinite resource, whose 
thatch had grown gray with cow outfits from the Rio 
Grande to the Canadian boundary. When he 

131 



The Greater America 



snatched a quiet hour in the early evening to join a 
group of cow-punchers spinning yarns of other days, 
he was reminded to recount as follows: 

" Some of you remember that fiddle-player over 
on the N-Bar-N Ranch? He's horse-wrangler for 
the Lazy S outfit now. Yes, that's the man. He 
rode past here yesterday, but he still looked sore and 
wouldn't stop. The boys were sure annoyed by his 
fiddle-playin' that time. He would sit around the 
bunk-house, ' wee-waw-In ' and ' wee-waw-in ' at all 
times of the day and night. He was just leamin' 
and it was torturin'. The rest of us got so it was 
more tryin' on the nerves to be dreadin' that fiddle, 
not knowin' when it was due to break loose, than to 
listen to it when it did happen. To get rid of this 
painful suspense, we worked out a scheme which was 
laid before the fiddler somethin' like this: 

" ' Here's what you can do. Figure out just how 
long each day you've got to practice to become a 
virtue-oso. If it's an hour, all right; If it's two hours, 
all right. But pick your spell, and name the hour 
of the day and stick to it hereafter. That gives us 
warnin' when to look out for it, and we won't be 
settin' around In a state of nervous panic and gettin' 
cases of horrors. If you don't like this, then your 
fiddle Is smashed over your head, pronto.' 

" The fiddler didn't like It, but he studied a while 
and said he needed two hours a day to keep his 
hand in. 

132 



Jack Teal and Some Others 



" ' All right,' says the gang. ' It's a tough propo- 
sition, but if it's two hours, she goes.' 

" Right on the first day ail hands got sore on the 
bargain, but the word had been passed and we stood 
pat. This locoed fiddler ' wee-waw-ed ' for a while 
and then asked how long he had been playin'. ' Half 
an hour,' said the man that held the watch. 

" He started up again and fiddled a while till his 
arm got tired, and then he laid down and wanted 
to quit. 

" ' One hour,' said the time-keeper. * Keep her 
goin'. We're makin' good on our end of the bargain. 
You can't lay down on your end of it, not on your 
life.' The fiddler grunted and cussed some, and 
sailed in and ' wee-waw-ed ' most mournful for half 
an hour more. Then the boys broke loose and 
renigged. They simply couldn't stand it any longer, 
for they saw that there would be no livin' through 
the winter with a bargain like that. So they grabbed 
Mr. Fiddler and strung him with a rope around his 
feet to two bull-rings about eight feet up on the wall, 
and left him, head down, to think it over, hopin' 
that if all his brains rushed to his head at once, he 
might get a gleam of horse sense and quit his vicious 
habits. 

" He wriggled quite violent, and finally managed 
to climb up his leg and get a knife out of his belt. 
Without carin' for consequences, he cuts the rope and 
drops on the back of his neck with a thump that 

133 



TJie Greater America 



shook the buildin'. He was fightin' mad when he 
come to, and he makes such a rash play with his knife 
that the musical festivities over at the N-Bar-N 
wound up for good with one man settin' on the 
fiddler's head, another on his stomach, and a third 
whalin' the fiddle into toothpicks against a post." 



134 



CHAPTER X 

THE LOST CHARLEY KEYES MINE 

The talk of the cow-men drifted back to recollec- 
tions of the days when the Missouri River was the 
great highway into the new Northwest, and a man 
from Fort Benton who had dropped in to visit old 
friends in the outfit was moved to relate the following 
tale: 

" Hunting after lost mines is an acute symptom 
of a sprained intellect. Oh, yes, I've been one of 
those fools who thought he could find the Pegleg 
and the Breyfogle and the Lost Cabin. Why, down 
In the California desert so many prospectors have 
gone dippy this way that when a man needs a tin hat 
to keep his brains from milling they don't call it 
locoed any more. They say he's ' Breyfogled,' and 
let it go at that. 

" But for action and what I might call feverish 
interest, the trip I made after the lost Charley Keyes 
mine was the finest ever. No, I didn't find the mine, 
but there was a mine, all right. It's there yet, and 
now and then you'll hear of a husky and hopeful gent 
with nothing better to do who is trailing off down the 
Missouri to find the spot where Charley Keyes dug 
out his load of nuggets thirty years ago. 

*' My partner and I were young and foolish, and 

135 



The Greater America 



we went at it in dead earnest. At Fort Benton we 
picked up all there was to know of the old story 
that had been thrashed out a million times. Here 
are all the facts we had to work on : Along in the 
early seventies this Charley Keyes, a prospector, was 
coming into this countiy with his partner, John 
Lepley. There were no railroads, so of course they 
came up the Missouri in a steamboat. Passing a 
point near the mouth of the Musselshell, about a 
hundred and fifty miles below Fort Benton, Keyes, 
who was an old California miner, was looking the 
country over from the hurricane deck, and observed 
to Lepley: 

" ' If I can read signs right there is gold in the 
hills over yonder, and I'm coming back here some day 
and do a little prospecting. It certainly looks good 
to me.' 

" Lepley recalled this remark later. But they did 
not hop off, and they wandered out of Fort Benton, 
prospecting over in the Prickly Pear district, and 
walked plumb over the Last Chance Gulch near 
Helena, where gold was found by the wagon load 
a few years later. They worked along on Silver 
Creek, without much luck until winter was coming 
in. Then Keyes decided to go back to Fort Benton, 
try to raise a little coin, get a new grub stake and 
work around farther east. He did not like the 
notion of staying out for the winter with no gold 
in sight and mighty little cash in their clothes. 

136 



mmi' 




M 





^ 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

Lepley balked and decided to stick it out and hold 
down their claims and take care of the camp. So 
they agreed to part company for the time, and Keyes 
laid down the law most emphatic in his farewell 
address to his partner: 

" ' If I send for you, Johnny, you drop everything 
and come. I don't care a hang what it is, but drop 
it and come quick.' 

" Keyes didn't go into details, and afterwards Lep- 
ley reckoned that those gold signs along the Missouri 
must have been stewing in his memory. Anyway, 
there is where Keyes headed for as soon as he could. 
He stayed in Fort Benton a little while, and then 
drifted down the Missouri and camped out with the 
soldiers at Fort Union, which stood east of the mouth 
of the Musselshell. He hunted buffalo for the garri- 
son for several months for his grub and wages, and 
was looking the country over and prospecting under 
cover, on the side. 

" When he had the country pretty well mapped 
out he cut loose from the fort and went off on his 
own hook and vanished. The next thing heard of 
him is when he turns up at Fort Benton with five 
thousand dollars' worth of nuggets in a sack. He 
left his gold with the bank, turned some into cash, 
and got a receipt for It. We found the record on 
the moldy old books of the bank when we tried to 
get on the trail twenty-five years later. This showed 
that Charley Keyes had found the mine all right. He 

137 



The Greater America 



stayed in Fort Benton long enough to get together a 
big outfit, which included a bunch of Blackfeet 
Indians to pack his goods. Keyes, his party and his 
kit and his mining tools and a lot of timber for 
building sluices started down the Missouri in flat 
boats to return to his mine. And that was the last 
ever seen of them alive, excepting one little Black- 
feet girl. From her it was learned that the party 
had been wiped out by a band of Sioux, who had 
an unpleasant habit of looking for river travel In 
those days. The first steamer up the river in the 
spring found ten bodies and buried them. The Sioux 
took the little girl along with them, but she escaped 
a few years later and made her way back to her tribe 
of Blackfeet. This catastrophe put a stop to hunting 
for the Charley Keyes mine for ten years or so, 
or until the hostile Indians were cleaned out of 
Montana. 

" We found the survivor on the Fort Belknap 
Reservation, a wrinkled hag of a Blackfeet squaw, 
who told us all she could remember, which wasn't 
much. She could recall that just before the massacre 
she had heard Keyes say they were ' two sleeps ' away 
from his mine, and that the place where he said this 
was close to old Fort Copeland. Now this fort long 
ago disappeared, but after a search we found an old 
map on which we located Fort Copeland, and felt 
that we had something definite to work on. 

" Lepley was dead, and we were lucky enough to 
138 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

find Mose Solomon, who had been on the steamboat 
when Keyes first came up the Missouri. The old man 
recalled that Keyes shaded his eyes and looked south 
across the hills and said: 

" * There's my country.' 

" This pinned the location of the mine down to a 
small area. It was near the junction of the Mussel- 
shell and the Missouri and two days' journey south 
from old Fort Copeland, if the squaw's memory 
could be trusted. So my pal and I set sail down 
the Missouri in a flat-bottomed skiff, prepared to 
rake the country with a fine-tooth comb. Do you 
know, we scraped our way down stretches of that 
old river that set a man back thirty years in the 
history of the West. 

" There were surely some relics of other days. 
We spent the night with one old cuss who had been 
an Indian trader in the merry days of the buffalo. 
The ruins of the old stockade were around his house 
where he used to trade whisky for robes. 

" ' I didn't calculate to keep any whisky on hand 
that was more'n twenty-four hours old,' said the old 
codger, without a blush of shame. ' I used to stand 
with one foot on the top of the stockade and the 
other on the roof of my shack and hand down a 
cup full of whisky to an Indian who handed me 
up a buffalo robe in exchange. Two or three of 
my men sat on the roof with loaded rifles, for the 
liquor was sudden and searchin', and we wa'n't 

139 



The Greater America 



takin' no chances. Business usually wound up in a 
grand orgy, and we sat inside with the gates barred 
till the skies cleared. We ginerally made the whisky 
out of alcohol and coloi'In' matter. Once I found I 
was clean out of stuff to paint it with, and I chucked 
in a quart of red ink that had been shipped to me 
by mistake. It made such a hit with the critturs 
that I had to send to Fort Benton for a case of it. 
The red ink brand of liquor was my long suit after 
that.' 

" There were things to remind you of the days 
when all the trade of the Northwest came up the 
Missouri in steamboats. We passed tons and tons 
of rusted mining machinery on the banks, where boats 
had blown up or run aground and abandoned the 
stuff. And once we drifted by a big stern-wheeler 
squatted In a field where the river had left It thirty- 
odd years ago. A lot of half-breeds had knocked 
doors and windows In the sides and were living in 
clover, 

" I shudder some when I think of what happened 
to me at Plermont, where we camped over night. 
The town consisted of a store and a saloon run by 
a man named Blocker. Once In a while a bunch of 
cow-punchers rode in and grabbed Plermont by the 
back of the neck and shook it up. This was the only 
excuse for Plermont. Blocker had a wonderful sys- 
tem of handling the drunken cow-puncher. When 
he had gambled away all his money, Blocker would 

140 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

amble out and look over his saddle pony and offer so 
many chips for the same. When the pony had been 
blown in, he would liquidate a few on the saddle and 
blankets. When the pilgrim was stripped to his hide 
and due to make some trouble about it, Blocker would 
fill him up to the nozzle with booze, put him gently 
in a little boat and ferry him across the Missouri. 
Depositing the unfortunate cow-puncher in the sage- 
bush, the good-hearted Blocker left a quart of whis- 
ky beside him, kissed him on the feverish brow and 
left him there to sleep it off. 

" I was a little uneasy about the tumultuous repu- 
tation of Piermont when I wandered into this metrop- 
olis all by myself, for my partner stayed with the 
boat. I floated into the saloon and was getting on 
sociably with the barkeeper when the most terrible- 
looking man I ever saw in my life clattered in from 
the street. He looked like quick death and he 
sounded like a shelf falling in a hardware store. He 
was big and tall and wide and his hair was long and 
black and the ends of his black mustache drooped 
down past his chin, and he glared in a way that would 
positively sicken you. He was decorated with a 
Winchester and two six-shooters, and a knife outside. 
I don't know what he had tucked away in his clothes. 
I threw my liquor down quick, saying to myself: 

" ' This is probably the last drink of whisky you'll 
live to enjoy, my son. This is the original Bad Man 
you've read about. I thought he was extinct, but 

141 



The Greater America 



here he is, all right, and he's just holding off to 
decide whether he'll carve you or perforate you or 
eat you raw.' 

" Of course, if you or I had seen this person in 
a Wild West show, we'd have set him down as a 
counterfeit, or a fossilized curio. But he was on a 
stamping ground of a good many bad characters 
who used to round-up In these little camps along the 
Missouri, and you can find some of them there yet 
who change their names so often that they can't 
remember whose mail to ask for if they ever ride In 
to a post-office. Maybe my story is wandering a 
little, but that's because I hate to come right down 
to it and confess how scared I was. When this most 
ferocious man looked at me I shivered. When he 
spoke to me I came so near jumping out of my boots 
that I found the uppers were ripped loose from the 
soles next morning. 

" ' What In the blue blazes are you doln' here? ' 
he roared at me. 

" Of course I said the most suicidal thing that 
could be imagined, being rattled. I didn't want to 
tell him that I was looking for a lost mine for fear 
he'd think I had money. And I didn't look much 
like a cow-man. So can you guess the rash and Idiotic 
conversation I produced from my addled think-tank? 
I stammered: 

" ' I'm looking up a sheep ranch for a friend of 



142 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

" You'd have thought I'd tried to drag him over 
the bar by his ropy mustaches, he was that insulted. 
He got red in the face and stamped his feet and he 
grabbed both his guns and rared and pitched some- 
thing frightful. When he could get his breath he 
hollered : 

'''Sheep, Sheep! If there's anything I despise 
worse than rattlesnakes and horned toads it's Sheep 
and Sheep-men. Me drink in the same room with a 
Sheep-man! Wow, Wow, blankety-blank your dou- 
ble-blankety-blank heart.' 

" Bang, bang! 

" With that he cuts loose and shoots some lead 
into the floor and shoots some more through the win- 
dow and tries to bust the lamp and misses it and 
froths at the mouth and Is dancing nearer to me with 
every whoop and every bang. 

" The red-headed barkeep didn't pull a gun, as I 
was hoping he'd do, for I hadn't the sign of a 
weapon, and I was too paralyzed to run. He ducked 
behind the bar and says to me in a hoarse whisper: 

" ' Kick him in the belly. Sport. He's got high- 
heeled boots on and he'll fall over backward. Then 
jump on his face. Kick him one in the belt. He's 
bound to topple over.' 

" The advice might have been sound, but by this 
time I found I had a pair of legs that belonged to 
me, and I put them in motion and sailed out of the 
door. As I flew I could hear the Bad Man roaring 

143 



The Greater America 



death to all sheep-men and shooting up the bottles 
on the bar. By luck I ran into a cow-puncher as 
I was making a sneak for the river, and I told him 
about the human tornado that was laying waste the 
hamlet of Piermont. 

" ' Oh, shucks ! ' said he, in a tone of deep disgust. 
' Is he loose again. Come back with me.' 

" I trailed along about six paces in the rear, but 
the cow-man never hesitated. I got inside the saloon 
in time to see him grab the Bad Man around the 
neck, point him toward the street and kick him every 
step of the way to a gully about thirty yards from the 
building. Then he took the arsenal off the fallen 
hero, slapped his face and left him there. 

" We walked back to have a drink, and the cow- 
puncher remarked: 

" ' He don't mean no real harm. He's the cook 
at the N-Bar-N ranch, and that's his way of amusing 
himself. He think's he's a bad man, but he's only 
a rotten bad cook. He's annoying to strangers, 
but I spanked him good, and I don't think he'll run 
no more whlzzers for a while.' 

" We got kind of chummy over a few drinks and 
he told me about another cook of a near-by ranch, 
who also failed to get away with a play In the same 
saloon of Piermont. 

" * It reminds me of the time when Nigger Bob 
got run out of town by Old Man Miller,' he began. 
' Nigger Bob was big and strong, a whale of a man, 

144 



TJie Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

and pretty bad when the booze was in him. Miller 
was a little wizened cuss past sixty, but game as a 
pebble. He was married to a squaw, and had a little 
hay ranch down the river a ways. One night he blew 
into this saloon, meek and mild, and sayin' nothin' 
to nobody. Nigger Bob was givin' it out loud and 
ugly that he had no use for a squaw-man, and he'd 
like nothing better than to round one up and tell 
him what he thought of him, and a whole lot of 
other promiscuous cussin' of squaw-men in general. 

" ' He wanted to have some fun with Miller, never 
thinkin' the poor old man would have the nerve to 
take it up. The old man huddled against the bar, 
growin' paler and whiter and chewin' his gray mus- 
tache. Finally he piped up : 

" ' " I'm married to a squaw." 

" ' *' Any man that 'ud marry a squaw is three 
degrees worse than a hoss-thief," yelled Nigger Bob. 

" ' The old man sidled to the middle of the room 
and looked up at Nigger Bob, who was grinnin' 
like a wolf. 

" ' " You'll have to take that back or fight," 
squeaks Miller, and calls him names that were fairly 
blisterin'. 

" ' Nigger Bob tells him: 

" ' " It's you that's got to apologize or fight now, 
you little squaw-lover, you." 

" * " I'm too old to fight, and I won't take nothin' 
back," says Miller. 

145 



The Greater America 



" ' It's a kind of a deadlock for a minute, and the 
boys try to coax Miller out of the room. But the 
old man won't have It. At last he slowly peels off 
his coat and says : 

" ' " I'll fight." 

" ' Nobody wanted to see the row go any farther, 
but the next thing that happened was that Nigger 
Bob grabbed the old man by the neck, flung him 
across his knee and spanked him. The old man was 
white as a sheet and his eyes were full of tears as 
he picked himself up and crawled out without another 
word. 

" ' After he was gone, one of the boys remarked to 
Nigger Bob, who was laughing fit to split himself: 

" ' " This is a sight more than a joke. Do 

you know where Miller's gone? " 

" ' " Gone to bed, I reckon." 

" ' " He's gone for his Winchester, and he's going 
to kill you just as sure as sunrise is due to-morrow." 

" ' Everybody looked so serious that Nigger Bob 
stopped laughin', and then his nerve began to ooze 
away. He waited about five minutes and then floated 
out. He wasn't gone more than ten minutes before 
the barrel of a Winchester showed in the door closely 
pursued by Old Man Miller, with his cheek against 
the stock and his finger on the trigger. He poked 
the barrel along the wall till he'd covered every man 
without finding Nigger Bob. Then he drifted away, 
and for one solid month he does nothing but wear out 

146 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

horses looking for Nigger Bob. He never does get 
him, for that coon jumped the country that very 
night, and he never did stop running. Nobody's 
ever seen hide or hair of him since.' 

" All of which has mighty little to do with the 
Charley Keyes mine, but I guess it was as near as we 
came to finding it. However, I'm drifting along 
toward it, so don't get impatient. We worked out all 
our signs, and found the Musselshell and where old 
Fort Copeland used to be and we shaded our eyes 
and looked south and said, ' There's my country,' 
and marched two sleeps and didn't sleep two winks. 
Our directions, which sounded mighty hopeful and 
definite at long range, kind of lost themselves when 
it came to prospecting every inch of ground within 
' two sleeps ' of the south bank of the Missouri. We 
stuck at It for two months, wore ourselves to a fraz- 
zle, and couldn't find a color. Charley Keyes may 
have lost a mine, but we didn't find it, and it was an 
awful big batch of landscape to mislay a mine in, 
you can bet on that. 

" Well, after we were discouraged and getting 
very peevish and short with each other, we made 
back tracks for Fort Benton, leaving behind us two 
worn-out gold-pans and a busted shovel. If you're 
not too weary please listen to the joyous sequel. By 
and by a blacksmith on a ranch over toward the 
Big Snowy Mountains thinks he'll take a whirl at 
looking for the treasure of the dead and gone Keyes 

147 



The Greater America 



person. He was an old prospector, and he had been 
brooding over this lost mine proposition for some five 
years or so. In fact he was a little disordered that 
way. He roamed around the Musselshell country 
until he ran across the rusty gold-pans and the shovel 
we had left behind. With that he goes clean up in the 
air, is cock-sure that these relics belonged to the late 
lamented Charley Keyes and that he had found IT. 
He turns up in Glasgow, a cow-town to the north- 
ward, and can't keep his precious secret. He'll blow 
into a thousand fragments if he don't spread the glad 
tidings, and in due time I get a telegram from my 
partner, who Is up in that section : 

" ' Come at once and avoid the rush. The mine 
Is found.' 

" In my blissful Ignorance I think we'll have a 
chance to beat out the stampede because we've been 
over the ground, and I hustle off to meet my partner, 
wondering who found the mine and how he found 
It, and never connecting It for a minute with those 
foolish pieces of hardware we had left In the wilder- 
ness. We pack down to the Musselshell, fairly sweat- 
ing under the collar, and find out, of course, what 
started the excitement. 

" It wouldn't be decent to try to tell you how 
disgusted we were. We knew there was no gold In 
the district, but as sure as I sit here there was a 
town of a thousand people sprouted up around our 
old gold-pans and shovels and they were coming In 

148 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

by hundreds every day and making the dirt fly like 
a locoed colony of prairie dogs. 

" ' Alexander City ' was the name of the town, in 
honor of the crazy blacksmith who was responsible 
for it. We were going to quit and go about our 
lawful business again, but the leading citizens 
wouldn't let us. They argued that we were the wise 
men of the camp, that we knew these diggings like 
a book, and that the town needed us. We didn't 
dare to tell them there was no gold anywhere near 
this fine big collection of lunatics, for fear they would 
lynch us. So I suggested to my party that we sink a 
shaft anyway. It would keep us busy and the crowd 
interested and make a diversion so that we could 
sneak away. 

" We went down sixty feet, cussing freely at the 
foolishness of the whole performance. Then we 
washed for color and we didn't get a show of it. 
Alexander City was a busted boom. But Alexander 
City wasn't allowed to know it quite yet. We were 
almost busted ourselves and self-preservation was 
entitled to draw cards In that game. We jollied the 
population along by running a cross-cut in our shaft, 
and at the same time we worked some other claims 
after a pattern devised by my partner. 

" He had brought along a nugget in his clothes, to 
tuck away as a cash reserve in case of urgent need. 
We would first open up a prospect on one of our 
claims and wait for a tenderfoot. When Providence 

149 



The Greater America 



sent him our way seeking a location we would offer 
to let him dig in one of our prospect holes upon the 
solemn promise that he'd give us everything he found. 
This was the way to let him see that the country 
was good, and if he found gold, then he'd have a 
tip to steer him about locating somewhere near our 
claim. 

" The pilgrim naturally wanted to make sure that 
there was gold in the camp, and he most cheerfully 
accepted the proposition, agreeing, mind you, to give 
us any gold he found on our property. 

" Meanwhile my partner's nugget had been care- 
fully salted in the bottom of the hole. 

" Then one of us would hide behind a screen of 
sage-brush and watch the victim dig. It was easy 
telling when he found the nugget, for he couldn't 
conceal his agitation, and generally we could see him 
stow it away in his clothes. Then we would jump 
him and ask him whether he had found anything. 
Of course he would deny it, and then we'd search him 
and find the nugget inside his shirt. 

" It would not do to let the camp know that a thief 
had been found in its midst. It was explained to 
the victim that lynching was a certainty if he was 
exposed, and the case was settled out of court. My 
partner had been made a justice of the peace for 
Alexander City and he collected a ten-dollar fine 
from the guilty tenderfoot, and the costs were taken 
out in drinks. 

150 



The Lost Charley Keyes Mine 

" Does it sound like a hold-up? Not a bit of it. 
We put our trust in these strangers, we had their 
word that they would be square with us and they tried 
to hog our nugget. 

" We did our little toward making virtuous men 
of them. If we had not punished them they might 
have gone on and become presidents of big life insur- 
ance companies. 

" Alexander City faded swiftly away, you couldn't 
find its remains to-day, but the Charley Keyes mine 
is still there. And men will be looking for it after 
you and I are dead and gone." 



151 



CHAPTER XI 

THE COW-PUNCHER VERSUS IRRIGATION 

Other days in the open range were made bright in 
memory by long rides over the crisp, brown buffalo 
grass; and other nights were enlivened by stories of 
a life that is almost gone, as told in the blankets 
around the camp fires. Then the scene shifted to 
another kind of life which seemed tame and colorless 
by contrast, but in which can be glimpsed not the 
past, but the future of this North country. 

In Williston, North Dakota, just beyond the Mon- 
tana boundary line, I found the men who stand for 
the new order of things. Some of them were dressed 
in khaki, leather puttees and campaign hats, with a 
military smartness of bearing. They were not army 
men, but the scouts of the peaceful invasion that Is 
crowding back our dashing heroes of the lariat and 
the branding iron. This engineer's party of the 
Government Reclamation Service had come to dis- 
cuss with the people of that region an irrigation proj- 
ect involving forty thousand acres of lands now used 
for wheat-growing and grazing. The gathering was 
like an old-fashioned " town-meeting " in New Eng- 
land. A hall was filled to overflowing with farmers 
and townsmen who pressed around a table on which 
was spread a map of the near-by country. Leaning 

152 




The neiv king of the cattle range 



The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 



over it was the Supervising Engineer from Wash- 
ington. The proceedings were in the nature of a 
heart-to-heart talk between Uncle Sam and his 
children. 

The paternal government was willing to advance 
the funds needed to increase the value of their lands 
twenty- and thirty-fold if a fair bargain could be 
struck with the owners. This was a minor project 
compared with the greater irrigation schemes in 
progress elsewhere in the arid West, but it was no 
less significant and interesting. Impressive facts, 
arrayed in terms of millions of dollars and acres, 
make rather bloodless reading, unless you can get 
behind them at the men and women concerned, whose 
essential joys and hopes and sorrows are little differ- 
ent from your own. Therefore this little assemblage 
In a small town of the Northwest appealed more to 
the imagination than the sight of some stupendous 
masonry dam impounding heaven knows how many 
millions of gallons of water in a corner of the 
Arizona desert. 

Here was a handful of hardy-looking men, just 
plain American farmers, who had won their holdings 
from a wilderness and carried their burdens without 
help. They were hoping for a verdict which would 
Increase the value of their land from five dollars to 
one hundred dollars an acre. The government pro- 
posed to lend them nearly a million dollars without 
interest to put the water on their land. They must 

153 



The Greater America 



agree to repay the loan, twenty dollars for each acre, 
in ten yearly installments. It would be easy to pay 
this from the greatly increased production. You 
would think that these farmers of Williston would 
jump to grasp such a magnificent benefaction. The 
Supervising Engineer looked up from his map and 
said: 

" It is the wish of the government that these 
irrigated lands shall be cultivated to the best advan- 
tage. It has been found in other reclaimed areas 
that eighty acres is as much land as one man can 
make highly productive. It is probable that the 
future will show forty acres to be the most effective 
farming unit." 

The postmaster replied in behalf of his fellow- 
citizens: 

" We are the fellows that suffered the hardships 
to get and keep our land. We came into this coun- 
try as pioneers, and settled it, and we have hung on 
by the skin of our teeth through thick and thin We 
deserve all we can get. Most of us have quarter 
sections, and we think we can handle our hundred and 
sixty acres and make money on the deal. It would 
not be fair to cut us down to eighty acres. The 
smaller the farm the more settlers will come in, 
that is true. But let us have the benefits of the irri- 
gation project. We are used to big farms. We need 
lots of land. But the main question is, do we get the 
water? " 

154 



The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 

Thus spoke the independent American to his gov- 
ernment, sticking up for what he believed belonged 
to him. The bigger question at stake was whether 
the government would approve the general project. 
This was what these people were breathless to know. 
Think what it meant to them. Sure crops, certain 
incomes, so swift an expansion of settlement that It 
would read like a fairy tale in any other country, 
every man's possessions swelled thirty-fold by the 
stroke of a pen in the hand of the Secretary of the 
Interior. After all, this meeting was as dramatic, in 
Its own fashion, as the fall round-up a hundred miles 
away. The Supervising Engineer announced with 
dignified deliberation: 

" In behalf of the Reclamation Service, I have 
decided to recommend the Williston project to the 
approval of the Secretary. His word is final, but we 
have gone over the ground ver^^ thoroughly, and I 
see no reason why you may not expect a favorable 
action at Washington. Your co-operation, as shown 
by the contracts signed, makes this a most promising 
undertaking." 

There was much shaking of hands and a few 
cheers. A lone cow-puncher on the sidewalk, who 
had seemed lost in such company, let out an exultant 
whoop. 

" Right here Is where I draw cards," he shouted 
to a friend. " I found a vein of coal while I was 
riding range. I made my location and I'm surely 

^55 



The Greater America 



in on the ground floor. The pumping plant to lift 
the water from the Missouri and put it on the 
bench lands will have to be staked out near my land. 
And I'm the boy to supply the coal. Here's one 
cow-man you punkin-rollers can't put out of busi- 
ness." 

In the heart of the Montana range is the Milk 
River Valley, a land of fertile farming soil three 
hundred miles long and sixty miles wide. Most of 
It was an Indian reservation until fifteen years ago. 
Since then it has been opened for settlement, and 
among the earliest pilgrims of the plow was a colony 
of Eastern farmers who founded the town of Chi- 
nook on the Great Northern, and spread around it 
along the valley. Upon this empty piece of cattle 
range has grown a town of two thousand people, 
with brick blocks, two school buildings, three churches 
and three hotels. Its business contributes a quarter 
of a million dollars a year in freight receipts. 

Chinook is an important shipping point for cattle 
and sheep, and the cow-puncher and the shambling 
herder with his faithful dogs mingle in the streets 
with the farmer who has brought to town a load of 
beets or alfalfa seed. The Chinook farmers who 
flung this outpost into the middle of the open range 
did not wait for government Irrigation projects. 
They sturdily banded together, men and teams, dug 
their own ditches, and made land that had been 
worth a few cents an acre to the stock-men yield 

IS6 



The Cow-Puncher Versus Irrigation 



from eighteen to twenty-five dollars a year in hay, 
wheat, fruit and alfalfa. 

They showed what could be done with the sleep- 
ing resources of the Milk River Valley. Now th: 
government is planning mightily to reinforce the 
work they so manfully began, and irrigation projects 
have been surveyed which will sweep twelve thousand 
square miles into the golden zone of cultivation. 
The future will see more than a hundred thousand 
families, each with a hundred and sixty acre farm, 
filling this Milk River Valley from end to end. In 
this one corner of the State of Montana irrigation 
will Increase the value of these open grazing lands 
more than fifty million dollars. 

The alarmist swears the country is going to the 
dogs when a few rascals In high places are exposed. 
But he does not know, or he pays no heed, when 
ten thousand honest men quietly go forth to build 
their homes in new places, and thereby clinch just 
so many more rivets In the keel of the American 
Ship of State. 

As the frontier passes, the nation waxes stronger 
and more unified, and the right arm of the Future is 
strengthened to deal with the problems that vex the 
Present. 



157 



CHAPTER XII 

THE HEART OF THE BIG TIMBER COUNTRY 

Lumbering is the chief industry of that vast region 
bounded on the north by Alaska, on the south by 
Cahfornia, on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and on 
the east by the Rocky Mountains. In this territory, 
known as the Pacific Northwest, nearly two hundred 
thousand men are employed in cutting down the 
last primeval forests of this country, and slicing these 
stately armies of spruce and fir and cedar into five 
billion feet of lumber and six billion shingles every 
year. 

This prodigious activity has built up cities and 
States and launched a mighty commerce. Its allied 
industries directly support half a million people. 
This timbered area is the richest natural treasure 
of the American continent, compared with which the 
gold mines of Alaska and Nevada are of picayune 
value for this and for coming generations. It is 
so wonderfully rich a treasure that Its owners are 
squandering it like drunken spendthrifts. In these 
mighty western forests a billion feet of lumber is 
wasted every year, enough to build one hundred 
thousand comfortable American homes. 

" Do these people ever think of the centuries 
through which their harvest has been growing?" 

158 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

implores a western man with the interests of his State 
at heart. " Does it never occur to them that they 
are the trustees of a heritage for future generations, 
to be guarded, cared for and watched, to be used 
only as necessity requires or price justifies, and not 
to be wantonly wasted or destroyed, or disposed of 
without adequate return? And how are they ful- 
filling their trust. They are leaving half their crop 
in the woods to be burned, and for the half they are 
marketing they are obtaining a beggarly return. 
They are leaving the ground a fire-swept, desolate 
waste. They are taking to themselves the whole 
of the heritage intrusted to them. The sacred 
right of property is theirs, and they do as they will 
with their own." 

The ancient woods of New England and Michi- 
gan and Minnesota have been stripped of their heavy 
growth by the logger; the white pine already belongs 
with the past, and a country which has been wont to 
consider its natural resources inexhaustible can fore- 
see the end of its timber supply within the next 
century unless the forests are replanted and cared 
for. It Is very hard for the American of this genera- 
tion to realize that there can be any end to the wealth 
of the land and the forests and the mines which have 
done so much to make this country what It Is. 

It is possible, however, to see American enterprise 
and headlong haste after quick returns attacking the 
" last stand of the big timber " with an energy that 

159 



The Greater America 



is fairly Infernal. A thousand mills, and fleets of 
steam and sail are waiting for this harvest, and yet 
it is tragic and almost pitiful to think that the future 
is being robbed of great treasures for the sake of a 
little profit in hand, and that a nation's birthright is 
being sold for a mess of pottage. 

It is characteristic of western men and methods 
that the ways of logging in the East should have been 
flung aside as crude and slow. The giant timber 
of the Washington forests on the slopes of the Cas- 
cades is not hauled by teams or rafted down rivers. 
Steam has made of logging a business which devas- 
tates the woods with incredible speed, system, and 
ardor. The logging camps of the Cascades differ as 
strikingly from the lumbering centers of northern 
New England as the electric gold-dredgers of the 
Sacramento Valley contrast with the placer diggings 
of the Forty-niners. In other words, the greater the 
need of preserving the forests, the greater is the 
American ingenuity for turning them into cash as fast 
as possible. 

The camp where I found these up-to-date lumber- 
men tearing the heart out of one of the noblest forests 
in America was near the Skykomish River in Wash- 
ington, where this mountain stream winds through 
the foothills of the western slopes of the Cascade 
Range. We set out from Everett in the early morn- 
ing and left the train at a raw little town called Sul- 
tan. Beyond the town was the wreckage of the 

1 60 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

forest, blackened patches where the fire had swept in 
the wake of the loggers, miles of gaunt and melan- 
choly trunks spared by the ax to die in flame and 
smoke. Beyond this devastated area rose the moun- 
tains, still clothed with trees, far up to the rocky 
heights, whose bare outline was fleeced with snow and 
wreathed in mists and clouds. 

In a near-by clearing was the camp of the lumber- 
men, a row of bunk-houses, a kitchen and a big 
dining-room. The buildings were of sawed lumber, 
because this material was easier to handle than logs, 
so that there was nothing picturesque in this first 
glimpse of the Pacific lumberman at work. His 
settlement looked like the beginnings of a frontier 
town. 

Past the camp ran a single-track railroad which 
wound up through a gash in the bold hills, twist- 
ing like a snake, climbing hills that would tire a pack 
train. It spanned ravines on crazy wooden trestles, 
and cut corners at impossible angles. No civilized 
locomotive could be expected to operate on this track, 
but presently a squat, broad-shouldered dwarf of an 
engine scuttled down from the hills with a train- 
load of logs behind it, and proceeded to show how 
singularly adapted it was for the work in hand. It 
was a deformed, one-sided looking monster, built 
for power, not for speed. The boiler was not hung 
over the center of its trucks, but sat well on the 
starboard side. Instead of driving-rods, a shaft was 

i6i 



The Greater America 



geared along one side, cogged and geared to every 
wheel, drivers and trucks, so that when the shaft 
turned and the gearing took hold, every wheel of 
this little giant bit hold of the rail, and pushed, or 
held back with concentrated energy. 

Soon this lop-sided toiler towed us up among the 
hills, away from the wreckage of the forest, and 
plunged into the green and towering vistas of Doug- 
las fir and red cedar and fragrant spruce. Part of 
this tract had been cut over, and the refuse might 
have marked the trail of a cyclone. But the " culls " 
left standing were majestic in size. They had been 
passed by as not worth felling. Two months before 
I had been loafing along the Kennebec River, watch- 
ing the tail end of the spring drive float down from 
the woods of northern Maine. Alas, most of that 
harvest had been sapling logs, toothpicks in size, for 
the pulp mills. The biggest of the timber logs of 
that Maine drive, looked like kindlings compared 
with these neglected " culls " of the Washington 
forest. 

When the logging train trailed into the virgin 
woods, the straight, clean trunks of standing timber 
were like the columns of a wonderful cathedral. 
Their spreading tops were more than two hundred 
feet in air, the branches clothed with moss like green 
velvet. Through their canopy of verdure the sun- 
light sifted, far down to the dense undergrowth of 
salmon-berry, tall ferns and other shrubs spreading 

162 



The Heart of the Big Timber Comitry 

m an almost Impenetrable mass. Many of the trees 
which made this splendid picture had been growing 
in their solitude for three or four hundred years. 
Now they were doomed to be destroyed by puny, 
bustling, swearing men with saws and axes, assailants 
who were tapping at their grand butts like so many 
woodpeckers. Mingled with the staccato tapping of 
the distant axes was the " rasp-rasp " of the sawyers, 
gnawing their way through in less than an hour 
that which it had taken God Almighty to perfect 
since the time when Columbus found this continent 
of ours. 

Presently a spur or branch line zig-zagged off from 
the railroad. The squat and laboring locomotive 
crawled along this side track, which was laid on top 
of the ground with so little grading that the rails 
billowed up and down the hills. The toot of the 
locomotive was answered by the scream of another 
whistle somewhere ahead, as if there were a bustling 
activity beyond the curtaining trees. The foreman 
of the " outfit " was waiting to go to the end of 
the " spur," and he swung himself aboard from a 
handy log alongside the track. He was a quiet young 
man with a frank gray eye, a square jaw and a fine 
pair of shoulders. He explained in reply to many 
questions : 

" I've got a gang of a hundred Irish, Swedes and 
Americans, and most of them get drunk whenever 
they get a chance. No, they aren't always easy to 

163 



The Greater America 



handle, but if you let little things worry you, you'll 
go crazy, so what's the use? I was raised in Michi- 
gan logging camps, and this getting timber out by 
steam power is different. I had to learn the business 
all over again when I came out to the coast. We 
run these spurs off the main line about every four- 
teen hundred feet, two of them off each side, parallel, 
you understand. Then we log between the two spurs, 
giving us a seven hundred foot haul either way to the 
flat cars. When we're through, we pull up our 
tracks and push ahead and then run the spurs off to 
the left and right in the same fashion. If you've 
been used to seeing logging with ox teams and sleds, 
you'll have a chance to see some real live action when 
you've watched the donkey-engine at work." 

His forecast was most conservative. Logging by 
steam, as it is done in the Cascades, is worth going 
many miles to see as a hair-raising spectacle. When 
the train toiled into a clearing, the donkey-engine 
stood near the track and the skidway which led to the 
loading platform. It was a commonplace looking 
" donkey," although bigger than most of its breed 
which puff and strain on docks and at the foot of 
derricks. The boiler and engine were mounted on 
a massive timber sled, whose runners or underpin- 
nings were two weighty logs. This timber raft had 
a blunt bow and a snub nose where the runners had 
been hewn away, like the front end of a New Eng- 
land " stone-boat." Stout guy-ropes ran to near-by 

164 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

trees, mooring the " donkey " as If it were an unruly 
kind of a beast. In front of the engine was a series 
of drums, wound round with wire cable which trailed 
off into the forest and vanished. 

The area across which these cables trailed was 
littered with windfalls, tall butts, sawed-off tops and 
branches, upturned roots fifteen feet in air. Huge 
logs, cut in lengths of from twenty-five to forty feet, 
loomed amid this woodland wreckage like the backs 
of a school of whales in a tumbling sea. No roads 
had been cut. It seemed impossible to move these 
great sections of trees to the railroad and thence 
to market. Teaming was out of the question in 
such a ruck as this. 

The only appliances in sight were the humble 
" donkey," and the aimless wire-cable which led off 
into the general tangle of things. Closer inspection 
showed a signal rope which led from the whistle of 
the " donkey " off into the woods without visible 
destination. Some one out of vision yanked this six 
hundred feet of rope. The " donkey " screamed a 
series of intelligent blasts. The engine clattered, the 
drums began to revolve and the wire cable which 
seemed to wind off to nowhere in particular grew taut. 
The " donkey " surged against its moorings, its mas- 
sive sled began to rear and pitch as if it were striving 
to bury its nose in the earth. 

There was a startling uproar in the forest, wholly 
beyond seeing distance, mind you. It sounded as if 

165 



The Greater America 



trees were being pulled up by the roots. The " don- 
key " was puffing and tugging at its anchorage as if 
it had suddenly undertaken to jerk out the side of 
the mountain. In a moment a log came hurtling out 
of the undergrowth nearly a thousand feet away. It 
was a section of tree six feet through, a diameter 
greater than the height of most men. It was forty 
feet long, and it must have weighed a large number 
of tons. 

It burst Into sight as If it had wings, smashing and 
tearing its own pathway. The " donkey " was not 
merely dragging it at the end of a wire cable a quar- 
ter of a mile long, it was yanking it home hand 
over fist. The great log was coming so fast that 
when it fetched athwart a stump it pitched over It as 
If it were taking a hurdle. Then it became entangled 
with another whopper of a log, as big as itself. The 
two locked arms, they did not even hesitate, and both 
came lunging toward the " donkey " and the railroad. 

The " donkey " did not complain of this extra 
burden. It veered sidewlse as if to get a fresh grip, 
reared a trifle more viciously, coughed and grunted, 
and jerked the burden along with undiminished vigor. 
It is an awesome sight to see a log six feet through 
and forty feet long bounding toward you as if the 
devil were in it, breaking off small trees as If they 
were twigs, leaping over obstacles, gouging a way 
for Itself with terrific uproar. 

I waited until the log was within twenty feet of 
i66 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

the loading platform, and then, fearful that the 
" donkey " might forget to let go in the excitement 
of the moment, I moved rapidly away from the scene 
of action. The huge missile halted in its flight, and 
the masterful " donkey " had a breathing spell. 

It was time to wonder how they were going to 
load this unwieldly brute of a log on a flat car. One 
realized the girth and weight of it when the " chaser " 
followed it in, and branded it by stamping one end 
with a sledge hammer. As he stood by the butt of 
it, the top of the log was well above his head. Now 
the " head loader," and " loader " assumed com- 
mand. They deftly rigged slings of wire cable 
around the log, and the donkey engine was asked to 
give them a lift. The tireless " donkey " squatted 
back, made a wild lunge or two before settling in the 
traces, and the log began to roll over and over up 
the inclined skidway in the bight of these slings. 

A pull here and a tug there, and the log rolled 
across the platform, and settled In Its place on the 
car, handled by steam and by steam alone from the 
time when the " fallers " and sawyers had brought it 
crashing to earth, and cut It Into sections. 

This was not the limit, however, of the resource- 
fulness of the " donkey." No sooner had this log 
been gripped by the back of the neck and flung aboard 
a car, than the gang back there In the woods had 
made another log fast to the trailing cable. Not 
a second was wasted. When the first log settled on 

167 



The Greater America 



the car a second was crashing and leaping through 
the forest. It was even more impressive to learn that 
when the " yard " is cleared, and it is time to move 
to another forest tract, the " donkey " loads itself 
aboard a flat car by a process analogous to that of 
lifting one's self by the bootstraps. The cables are 
belayed to convenient trees, the " donkey " takes 
hold, the drums revolve, and the astute engine hauls 
itself along until it is close to the loading plat- 
form. Now purchases are secured, and the ponder- 
ous machinery jerks itself up the skidway prepared 
for its passage. One more clever effort and it hauls 
itself across the platform to the car, thus demon- 
strating itself a " donkey " whose capabilities give 
the lie to its name. 

We followed the cable back into the forest while 
the coast was clear. There was first the " haulback," 
a wire rope more than half a mile long, which led 
in a wide circle through that part of the forest which 
was being logged by this particular " donkey." This 
cable is an errand boy for the larger and stronger 
cable which does the heavy work. The " haulback " 
leads from the drums of the donkey-engine, turning 
corners through sheaves made fast to trees, and is 
thus an endless line which can be reeled out or in to 
carry the stronger cable whenever it may be needed. 
It would be a slow and back-breaking task for men 
to pull the big cable through such a tangle of forest 
as this. Therefore they hitch a length of it on to 

i68 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

the " haulback," the " donkey " kindly assists, and 
deposits the gear just in the right spot. Then the 
" hook tenders " and " rigging slingers " fall to, and 
pass the heavy cable, or " lead," around the end of 
the log, making it fast with big steel hooks which 
bite deep into the shaggy bark. 

Thus harnessed, there is no more use for the 
"haulback" cable, and the "donkey" reels in the 
bigger cable with the log at the end much as one 
handles a fish that is securely hooked. Ahead of this 
gang are the " windfall buckers," who saw into handy 
lengths such fallen trees as are square in the way. 
These are jerked aside by a " lead " from the big 
cable, but it is not considered necessary to clear the 
path any more carefully than by the removal of these 
most conspicuous obstacles. 

The men work in a dense and damp undergrowth, 
in mud and slime up to their knees when the autumn 
rains fall for months on end. It is slippery, trying 
work, and when the steel hooks lose their grip, and 
the lengths of cable whip blindly through the air, 
and the log runs amuck before the ardent " donkey " 
can be checked, there is such vivid and varied pro- 
fanity as cannot be found outside a polygot lumber 
camp in the untamed West. 

This part of the logging industry in the Cascades 
is essentially business-like and specialized. It lacks 
romance, although the method of it is filled with 
dashing and picturesque energy. If you would see 

169 



The Greater America 



the tragedy of the big woods, you must wander a 
little back from the " donkey's " area of infernal 
activity. Down the columned aisles of these noble 
trees there rings a long, deep call: 

*' Look out of the r-o-a-d." 

It is the warning signal of the sawyer, the dirge 
of a big tree which is about to fall. From a few 
hundred feet away there is a fierce crackling like the 
volley firing of rifles. The fibers of the giant are 
being torn asunder. A mighty green crest more than 
two hundred feet in air begins to sway ever so slightly 
as if moved by a big wind. Then comes a long- 
drawn, rending crash, gathering volume as the heart 
of the tree is ripped In twain. Now the top of the 
tree, far up in the bright sunlight, begins to move 
toward the earth, very slowly. It seems a long time 
before it gathers headway and begins to crash In a 
sweeping arc down among the trees around and 
beneath It. The air is full of torn branches and 
fragments of the smaller trees that are in the shat- 
tering path of this fall. 

So fast is the flight of the tree as Its mass picks 
up momentum that the wind wails through its top, 
and the sound of it can be heard afar. There Is a 
vast, solemn groaning sound, and then with the noise 
of thunder the tree smites the ground, and the earth 
trembles. It Is an Impressive spectacle for the lay- 
man who Is not figuring how many feet of lumber 
this prostrate monarch will yield. Nor does It cheer 

170 



'The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

him to learn that one of these great trees is worth 
only fifty dollars to the logger, and that when it 
reaches the mill it will be cut up into ten thousand 
feet of lumber. 

When it is down, the " buckers " attack it. With 
one man on each end of a long and limber saw, the 
tree is soon cut into handy lengths, ready for the wire 
cable and the obstreperous donkey-engine.. Perched 
high on their spring-boards set in notches made in 
the butt six or eight feet above ground, the " fallers " 
are at work, nibbling at other great trees before the 
saws come into play, for these trees are sawed, not 
chopped down, and the ax does only the preliminary 
work. Twenty trees are felled every working day 
by the crew of two " fallers " and one " undercutter," 
twenty trees, together worth a thousand dollars as 
they fall. 

Fifty men work In each gang, and two " yards " 
are being cleared at the same time, so that a hundred 
men toil to keep the two donkey-engines and the rail- 
road spurs busy. Between forty and fifty big trees 
come down in the day's work of the " outfit." They 
are a strong and hustling lot of men. Logging by 
steam admits of no leisurely methods. The gangs 
are kept on the jump to measure pace with the 
" donkey " and the busy little railroad, and profits 
are so small at best that no time can be wasted. The 
boss drives his crews, but he feeds and pays them 
well, and they have no snow-bound winters to fight. 

171 



The Greater America 



When the day's work was over in the " yards " 
we visited, the men came flocking from the woods 
to board the train that was waiting to carry them 
down to the camp at the foot of the hills. They were 
rough and husky men, ready for a fight or a frolic, 
but the quiet young foreman with the gray eye and 
square jaw held their respectful attention whenever 
he joined a group on the swaying flat cars. Most of 
the cars were piled high with logs, and the broad- 
shouldered, lop-sided little engine had to hold back 
with all its might to prevent the train from running 
away with it. 

We slowed up at another " yard " where a spur 
of track led to a loading platform. Here an 
unwearied " donkey " was engaged in its last task 
of the long day. It was perched on the crest of a 
hill beyond which the cleared land pitched down to 
a shallow pond. Across the pond a trail opened 
into the dense forest, a trail furrowed like an irrigat- 
ing ditch. Down the hill, through the pond, and 
along the furrowed ditch ran the wire cable, taut and 
humming as the " donkey " pulled it home. 

It was a matter of minutes while we waited and 
looked at the opening in the woods. Then the log 
heaved in sight, riding grandly through the shadows 
like a sentient monster. It charged out of the woods, 
hurling earth and stones before it. On top of it 
stood a logger, swaying easily, shifting his footing 
to meet the plunges of his great beast, a dare-devil 

172 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

figure of a man outlined against the sunset sky as the 
log flew down hill. Before it dived Into the pond he 
made a flying leap, and tumbled Into the undergrowth 
with a yell of pure enjoyment. Then the log tore 
through the pond amid a whirlwind of spray, and 
moved up the opposite slope to the end of Its long 
journey. 

Fully as heroic as the figure of the logger on the 
riding home was the man perched above the groan- 
ing drums of the donkey-engine. He handled his 
straining cables and machinery in a fashion to suggest 
the management of an elephant by means of a walk- 
ing-stick. When the tooting signals came to him 
that all was ready somewhere out in the woods, he 
let the " haulback " unwind, and then tightened the 
pull on the big cable and made ready for action. 
When the signal came that meant " go ahead," he 
threw his lever over, and a hundred horse power 
surged Into being not by easy gradation, but with 
a fierce and sudden jump. It was like starting a 
heavy train by throwing the throttle wide open. It 
was taken for granted that everything would hold 
together, and, mirahile dlctii, it did. And when the 
log moved, it was with the power of a hundred horses 
jumping Into their collars as one and starting on the 
gallop. The most vivid impression of the day among 
the big timber was made by the " donkey-engine " 
as used In modern logging. It (I was going to 
say "he") is an uproarious embodiment of the 

173 



The Greater America 



American spirit in action, with no time for sentiment. 
The " donkey " recks not of the tragedy of the big 
trees. It rolls up it sleeves and proceeds to get results 
or break its back in the attempt. 

In a hundred valleys of the Far West and along 
a hundred hillsides the logger is tearing the forest 
to pieces by these twentieth century methods. He 
picks out the choicest timber for slaughter, leaves 
the remainder to be burned by the fires which follow 
his crews, and is making desolation in the noblest 
wilderness left to the American nation. He has 
invested money in the ownership of timber lands. 
He is unwilling to let this investment lie idle. The 
only way in which he can get returns is by cutting 
timber, and he is not to be harshly blamed for wish- 
ing to realize on his investment. He has been crim- 
inally wasteful and careless, and he is beginning to 
see the folly of his ways. 

His spirit of extravagance and contempt for the 
future has been of a piece with the handling of the 
public domain as if Uncle Sam and his people could 
never come to the end of their rope. The demand 
for timber is enormous, and the men who possess it 
are average, hard-working Americans who want to 
make a success of the business in which their dollars 
and their Industry are staked. 

There Is a class of sentimentalists who make out- 
cry against all destruction of forests, as If lumber 
could be made In a mill and not from trees. Vast 

174 



The Heart of the Big Timber Country 

as is the production of the forests of the Pacific 
Northwest, the annual cut amounts in board measure 
to only twice as much as the annual consumption of 
timber for railroad ties alone in the United States. 
About two hundred railroad ties is the average yield 
of forest per acre, and to replace the worn-out ties 
and lay new track for one year means the stripping 
of one half million acres of American forest. Bridge 
timbers, telegraph poles, etc., swell this demand to 
a million acres. of forest, cut down each year to malnr 
tain American railroads. And railroad ties are a 
small item in the total consumption of lumber. 

..One of the most hopeful sdgns of the times is the 
changing attitude of the lumbermen toward the 
science of forestry as fostered by the Federal Govern- 
ment; They are beginning to see that their industry 
is doomed to an. early extinction imless the wastage 
is checked and the forest is renewed for future genr 
erations. And more than this, unless the forests are 
preserved, vast tracts of fertile and prosperous 
America will become desert in the next centuity. This 
is a lesson taught by such countries as Tunls^ now a 
part of the North African desert, which in old times 
was a smiling and populous garden. An Arab chronir 
cler relates that " in those days on^ could walk from^ 
Tunis to Tripoli In the shade." The Arab conquest 
destroyed the forest, arid the desert swept over the 
face of the land. 

It is difficult to realize that all attempts to educate 
175 



The Greater America 



the present-day American in the value of forest pres- 
ervation fly in the face of the teachings of his imme- 
diate forefathers. In an address dehvered at the 
American Forest Congress last year, this change of 
national view-point was put in a striking manner : 

" No reasonable man would be disposed to 
denounce the early settlers of the timbered portions 
of North America for cutting away the forests. 
Cleared land was necessary for the growing of food 
products which were needed to sustain life. A man 
with a family by a courageous enterprise, or by the 
force of circumstances, projected into the wilderness, 
would not hesitate to cut down and clear off the tree 
growth as rapidly as his strength permitted. Self- 
preservation is the first law of nature, and the pio- 
neers in our forest areas had to clear the land or 
starve. Moreover, in the early period of settlement 
he was considered the greatest benefactor of the 
State, and to the community in which he lived, who 
slashed down the most forest and cleared the most 
land. There was no thought of the future value of 
timber. It was a cumberer of the ground, like ledges 
of rock and the loose stones of the glacial drift. The 
lumberman was not a devastator, but performed a 
useful function by removing that which, as it stood, 
had little or no value." 

The lumbermen of to-day, realizing that our 
grandfathers attacked the timber as an enemy rather 
than a friend, are asking : " How can I cut my 

176 






I 




1 




^^^^^__ 


& _..-^jiy 


^^ 




^Hi^B^^^HE^ ' 




1 



I { litre loi[s 



loomed amid this li'oodland wreckage " 



Tlie Heart of the Big Timber Country 

timber now, and at the same time grow a new crop 
for future supply? " The Forestry Bureau at Wash- 
ington is ready to tell the lumberman how to face 
this problem, and, better yet, offers to send its ex- 
perts to show him, on the ground, how to cut his 
timber to the best advantage for present and future 
use. 



177 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE MAN WHO FOUND HIMSELF 

" Hello, old man." . ,_.,.. , 

I faced about at the sound of this greeting voice 
in the street of a town on the shore of Puget Sound, 
and saw a tall and sunburned man of a rugged aspect 
who held out a hand in welcome. There was some- 
thing very familiar in the boyish smile and the danc- 
ing light of his blue eye, but for the moment the 
" Stetson " hat, the flannel shirt and the corduroy 
breeches were an effective disguise. While I sparred 
for time in which to link him with past acquaintance, 
he observed, with a chuckle: 

" The last time we met you blew into my special 
car to join the gang on the way to the Yale-Harvard 
game." 

Then, of course, I knew him, but he could scarcely 
blame me for failing to recall him at the first glance, 
so great was the transformation not only in garb, 
but in the whole demeanor of the man. Five years 
before, he had suddenly vanished from the haunts 
that had known him, nor had any word come back, 
in all this time, to tell his host of friends in New 
York that he was still alive. A genial idler, drifting 
in swift and pleasant currents, he has flung away a 
fortune in many gilded follies to reap the verdict 
that *' his only enemy was himself." A stalwart 

178 



The Man Who Found Himself 

body and a fine mind had been so rapidly losing their 
keen edge that his friends were beginning to predict 
an inevitable smash, when he capped their worries by 
a startling disappearance. 

I remembered these things as we shook hands 
again with much fervor, and called each other hard 
names, in the foolish fashion of men when they are 
very glad to see each other. We dined together, and 
he was persuaded to talk of his five years of wander- 
ing. At times it was hard to believe that this was 
the man I had once known. This was an American 
of the pioneer breed, from his heels up. The set of 
his jaw was new, the poise of his head was that of 
quiet confidence, and in his eyes there was an un- 
quenchable belief in himself and his destiny. • , 

He did not have to tell it for me to perceive that 
here was one who had " found himself " in. the bat- 
tering stress of circumstances. He had not. pros-, 
pered as the world measures prosperity, but he had 
won that which was worth many times the fortune 
he had squandered as a wastrel in. his earlier years. 
When he began to talk of the., life that had made a 
man of him, it was in the. measured, almost subdued, 
tone which you hear among men who have lived long 
on the .-trail of the western frontier, on range and 
ranch and prairie: 

" You needn't say anything in New York about 
running across me out here. I'm not ready to break 
cover yet. Some day I am going back, but not until 

179 



The Greater America 



I have found the place that is waiting for me some- 
where, and have made my stake. It's there, I know, 
and I am moving along until I catch up with it. I'll 
let you blow me off to this dinner for old times' sake, 
for it may be the last decent meal I'll have for a 
while. I have a few dollars in my clothes, but I may 
need them for railroad fare and grub money until 
I connect with another job. I've just quit my berth 
here, aboard a fishing schooner, after punching the 
head of the mate. Now I am steering for the lumber 
country up in the mountains. 

" We used to talk about the world's being so small 
that one could not travel far without meeting a 
familiar face. I have been on the move for five 
years, from the Rio Grande to the Canada border, 
and you are the first man I've seen that I used to 
know. What became of me when I fell off the edge 
of New York and left you all guessing? I didn't tell 
the crowd that I had come to the end of my rope, and 
that I was broke, and that the giddy round was all 
over for me. I looked around New York in a lucid 
interval after I made this painful discovery, and 
found that there was nothing for me in the town 
except to beg one of my friends for a job as a clerk 
in his office. There was nothing that I was good for 
as a bread-winner. It was too much like asking 
charity to try to persuade anybody to pay me a sal- 
ary. I couldn't stand for the notion of it. 

" So I simply headed away from it all without a 
i8o 



The Man Who Found Himself 

plan in my head, and about two hundred dollars in 
my pocket after paying oft my valet and squaring up 
my club bills. I simply steered west, where there 
was more room for action, and where I could keep 
clear of my friends. In the first week I lost what 
cash I had playing the races, as a get-rich-quick propo- 
sition. Then I was down and out. It's an interesting 
situation, but rather disquieting until you get har- 
dened to it, this being without work or coin. It was 
a case of rustle for grub and a bed, and I began 
right there to find out what the real world was 
made of. 

" It was in the summer, and I decided to try to 
beat my way on the railroad and get as far as the 
grain country, where the farmers were offering all 
kinds of fancy wages for harvest hands. The pro- 
fession of the hobo requires training to be success- 
fully practiced, and I bungled it at the start. Three 
strong brakemen tossed me off a freight train at the 
edge of an Ohio town, and I wandered into the public 
square and sat on a bench to rest. I was dead for 
sleep, and sore and hungry, for I had been without 
food for twenty-four hours. On a bill board across 
the way were some circus posters, and presently a 
man strolled by whom I recognized as one of the 
partners of the show. We had crossed the Atlantic 
on the same steamer two years before, and sat across 
the table in the smoking-room during a two days' 
poker session. 

i8i 



TJie Greater America 



" ' Hello, Jerry Walsh,' said I. ' I'm looking for 
a job.' He sized me up and was tactful enough to 
ask no questions. 

" ' Up against it? ' said he. ' What can you do in 
a circus ? ' 

" ' I drove my own four-in-hand well enough to 
win a few blue ribbons,' I replied, ' and I guess I 
could handle a chariot as well as the next man.' 

" ' Come over to the tent,' said Jerry Walsh, with 
a grin. 'We're shy a chariot driver just now. It's 
a funny old world, ain't it? ' ; •.-, 

" Calling out the boss of the stables, he told him, 
without wasting words : ■; 

• " ' Here is a New York swell that wants a job.l 
He can drive horses to beat Jehu, though he ain't 
good for much else. Hitch up the sorrels and give 
him a try-out. We'll want them in the street parade 
this morning.' » 

" The helpers hooked up twelve sorrels in front 
of a gilded Roman chariot, and I got aboard. They 
were not hard to handle, and I drove figures-of-eight 
and cut corners until the boss was satisfied. Then he, 
rjgged me out in a flowing toga, and a gilt crown, and 
I was a Roman charioteer on the payroll. I drove 
the sorrels for two weeks, in the ring and in the street 
parades, and it was pretty fair sport But I couldn't 
see any future for me in the circus life, and we parted' 
cbmpany as soon asT had a few dollars ahead! 

" It Was sweeter and cleaner to join the army of 
182 



The Man Who Found Himself 

harvest hands, and so I followed the wheat harvest 
from Kansas up to Manitoba and back again. It 
nearly broke my back, for I was soft and flabby, but 
little by little I got as hard as nails and able to take 
care of myself. In this first year I saw that my old 
life had been fast making a wreck of me. I was 
learning to stand on my own two feet, and to sleep 
without the fear of going broke or losing my job. 
The world could not starve me and I was as able to 
rustle a living out of it as the next man. So I kept 
moving on, now as a trolley conductor, now as a 
freight brakeman, again as farm hand, and trying a 
dozen other things. 

" At last I drifted Into the cattle country, and was 
a cow-puncher for two years In Wyoming and Mani- 
toba. They called me ' New York Red ' on the 
ranges, and I managed to make good after I'd learned 
to keep my mouth shut and to try to hold up my end 
of any job I had to tackle. You run Into queer odds 
and ends of life when you get close down to it on 
the range. Sometimes It's like seeing the curtatin fall 
on a play before It Is finished, and you are' left to 
wonder what happened afterwards. I ran' across 
one man In the cow country who had come out of my 
own world back East. He was a Harvard man, and 
the punchers called him 'Four-eyed Texas 'because 
he wore glasses whenever he got a chance to read. I 
never knew his real name, and none of us ever asked 
him what It was. Somewhere In his past there was 

183 



The Greater America 



a streak of bad medicine. He was a man afraid of 
himself, and worse scared of somebody else that 
must have been looking for him. We were sure that 
somebody was camping on his trail, and we asked no 
questions. We could not help seeing that he never 
sat by the fire at night, where he might make a target, 
but always spread his blankets away off in the 
shadows. He had two guns ready all the time, and 
he jumped when he was suddenly spoken to. 

" While riding on the round-up one day, I met a 
stranger about ninety miles from our home ranch 
where ' Four-eyed Texas ' was working. The 
stranger, who looked very glum and hostile, began 
to ask me about the different punchers in our outfit. 
He had more curiosity than was normal, and at last 
he pulled a photograph from his pocket and asked 
me if I had ever happened to see a man that looked 
like the picture. It was our Harvard man beyond a 
chance of mistake. I swallowed hard and lied to 
the best of my ability. What I told him was that I 
had seen a young man exactly like that photograph 
and description, about three months before, heading 
into the Judith Basin. This was as far away from 
our ranch as I could figure out in a hurry. The 
stranger thanked me and started toward the Judith 
Basin, riding hard, as if he had something important 
on his mind. 

" As soon as I could get back to the ranch I told 
' Four-eyed Texas ' of the interview. He thanked 

184 



The Man Who Found Himself 

me and made no comments, but that night he van- 
ished with the best pony in his string, and we never 
saw or heard of him again. Now what had this 
Harvard fugitive ever done to set this other man 
on his trail hke a human bloodhound? There was 
sure to be some killing when they met. You could 
see it in his manner as long as he stayed with us. But 
he rode away in the dark and carried his story with 
him, and it was just a fragment of life in the big 
West. 

" For almost a year I was with an army pack train 
at Fort Assiniboine, and in the Yellowstone. There 
was a life in which you could depend upon the govern- 
ment mule to drive monotony far, far away. I recall 
one Sunday afternoon when we were in camp after 
a hard march. The pack mules were grazing, and 
I was reading a tattered novel, and a holy quiet 
brooded over the landscape. A freight outfit trailed 
past and a tarpaulin blew off one of the wagons and 
danced across the country. This stampeded the bell 
mule, which was roped to a tree. The skittish crea- 
ture tore the tree up by the roots and started across 
country, and the pack train proceeded to scatter itself 
over twenty-five square miles of landscape. After 
we had collected them, another stampede happened 
at night, and the mules swept clear over the camp, 
knocking tents Hat and demoralizing the outfit as If 
a cyclone had struck it. 

" While I was quartered at Fort Assiniboine there 
185 



The Greater America 



came a call from the reservation for troops. The 
colonel sent for the chief packer, with orders to have 
the mule train made ready for service. The chief 
packer had gone to town. The colonel sent for the 
second packer. He had also gone to town. The 
colonel swore, and asked if there was anybody left 
of the party attached to the condemned pack train. 
The orderly reported: 

" ' They have all gone to town, sir.' 

" ' Who the devil is left of the outfit? ' 

" ' Only the cook, sir.' 

" ' Fetch him here.' 

" The cook was a cockney Britisher, who reported, 
with fear and trembling: 

" ' Please, sir, they 'ave all gone to town to get 
drunk, sir.' 

" ' Why in blazes didn't you go with them? ' thun- 
dered the colonel, with a fine touch of sarcasm. 

" ' Please, sir, I didn't 'ave the price to get drunk, 
sir, and they wouldn't lend it to me, sir.' 

" No, I didn't go to town to get drunk, old man," 
continued the wanderer. " It's queer, perhaps, but 
I have cut out the booze, and I have kept myself 
clean and fit through it all, because I want to be 
ready when my big chance comes, whatever it Is. And 
there's something in a husky, out-door life like mine 
that makes some men want to keep fit and decent all 
the time. And there's been lots of pleasure with the 
hard knocks. Why, for a while I drove a stage out 

i86 



The Man Who Found Hiinself 

of Great Falls, Montana. We horsed It with un- 
broken bronchos and put them Into harness by main 
strength. I drove the coach over part of the run 
between London and Brighton one summer, just for 
fun, and I thought It was pretty fair sport. But It 
was slow and tame beside the whirlwind rush of that 
start out of Great Falls. In the traces was a bunch of 
cyclones with hair on them. Once started there was 
no holding them until they had run themselves tired. 
For the first ten miles out of town my stage ran as a 
through express, making no stops, because we couldn't 
stop. It was a matter of keeping the bronchos headed 
straight and pouring the leather Into them. Over 
this route we covered a hundred and twenty-eight 
miles In eighteen hours, which was going some for 
that kind of country with no roads worth the name. 

" From stage driving I shifted to freighting wool 
Into Great Falls, with an outfit of twelve horses and 
a string of trail wagons carrying three thousand dol- 
lars' worth of wool every trip. Then I was led astray 
by the possibilities of piling up swift wealth In raising 
sheep. I thought my chance had come after I broke 
a faro bank In Gilt Edge and walked out with three 
thousand dollars In cash. I put It all In sheep, and 
lost It all In three days, when a May blizzard burled 
my sheep so deep that I never found them to dig 
them out. 

" While I was in Montana, as cow-puncher and 
sheep-man, I used to get little glimpses of civilization 

187 



The Greater America 



now and then. On my days off I would get into a 
clean pair of overalls and ride into Great Falls and 
browse all day in the public library, reading the new 
books and magazines, and having a royal literary 
spree. At length I moved on to the Pacific Coast, 
and worked in the sawmills along Puget Sound until 
I knew the business from top to bottom. As fore- 
man of a gang I broke all records in loading lumber 
aboard vessels, and I was pretty proud of it. It was 
my pet theory that because I had some brains and 
education I ought to be able to load lumber or boss 
a bunch of men in better shape than the average 
laborer. Therefore, wherever I was working, if I 
was not made a ' straw boss ' or given a bunch of men 
to handle inside a month, I threw up the job and 
moved on. 

" Stevedore or cow-puncher, harvest hand or brake- 
man, sailor or lumber-jack, I have never regretted 
breaking away from the soft, fat, useless life I used 
to lead in New York. It's all right for you to think 
that in five years I ought to have ' made good ' and 
settled down in some kind of a berth with a solid 
future attached. But I have earned every dollar 
I've spent, and I have been learning a few things, 
and I have won what your city man on a salary never 
does get, freedom from the shackles of fear, fear of 
losing his job, fear that he cannot meet his bills, fear 
that he will starve if he is forced out of the narrow 
rut in which he has made his livelihood. I have 

i88 



The Man Who Found Himself 

made two or three good-sized stakes, one in Alaska, 
and lost them in playing for bigger stakes. But I 
am not much past thirty, and the world is big and 
busy, and it needs me somewhere. So I shall move 
on, until I find my niche, and then I shall win out 
and win out big. When that day comes you may see 
me back on Broadway, but not until then. I may 
look like a failure to you, but I am a heap sight 
more of a man than when I was chartering special 
cars and driving my own coach." 

The wanderer smote the table with a hard and 
calloused palm, and his brown face glowed with a 
manly earnestness which was good to see. 

" You don't know what it is to pull your belt 
tighter for lack of grub, and to keep your nerve 
though you haven't a cent, and always to feel sure 
that there's a job waiting ahead if you keep on mov- 
ing. It's a good gamble, if you look at it right, and 
it's a blessed thing never to be bored and tied down." 

With all his brave attitude, there was a wistful 
look in his eyes when he asked me about men and 
women and places that had been dear to him in the 
East. But he had learned to " take his medicine," 
and to pay the price without flinching. And, more 
than this, he had found something worth while. It 
was true, as he said, that fear had been banished from 
his world of action. He had cast from him the 
cramping artificialities of the life in which he had 
been reared and spoiled, and he had become changed 

189 



The Greater America 



into a man who was fit to do and to dare all things, 
and to face any odds by virtue of his strength and 
courage and endurance. He had nothing to lose and 
everything to win as he pressed on along the unknown 
trail, under the big sky, with the fresh winds in his 
face. He had suffered much, in mind and body, but 
with it all he had kept unspoiled his faith in human 
nature, his faith in himself, and, what was as impor- 
tant, his sense of humor. 

Even though success had eluded him, it seemed 
to me that " he had made good." He was braced to 
fight and to strive, and wealth would not have spoiled 
this stirring game which he was playing with so high 
a heart. Nor could I help sharing his buoyant confi- 
dence that some day he would return to Broadway 
and Fifth Avenue, a wanderer and exile come back 
to his own, after winning the fortune that was wait- 
ing somewhere along his trail. 

We parted in the late evening, and he turned his 
face toward the big timber country, reliant, hopeful, 
and unafraid. It occurred to me that these fragments 
of his story might be worth while recording, because, 
in the course of a year, many a young man is heard to 
say that he wants to try " roughing it in the West " 
for a time, in order to gain health, or experience, or 
what not. Here was a young man unfitted by his 
earlier training to do any kind of work, and yet he 
has lived and toiled as a man among men for some 
five years without being overtaken by starvation, and 

190 



The Man Who Found Himself 

perhaps his story carries a moral, even though he has 
chosen to follow, instead of the prudent maxims of 
Poor Richard's Almanac, the reprehensible desire of 
him who sung: 

" Therefore from job to job I've moved along, 
Pay couldn't hold me when my time was done, 
For something in my 'ead upset me all, 
Till I 'ad dropped whatever 'twas for good. 
An' out at sea, beheld the «^ock-light die, 
And met my mate, — the wind ihat tramps the world." 



191 



CHAPTER XIV 

A BREATH FROM ALASKA 

Only ten years have passed since the steamer Port- 
land came Into Seattle with the first big shipment of 
gold from the Yukon and Nome in her treasure room. 
Since then more than a hundred million dollars in 
raw gold have poured 'nto the assay office at Seattle. 
It has created a traffic of twenty million dollars a 
year with Alaskan ports, the greater part of which 
streams northward from Seattle. 

If you think that steam has wholly banished hot- 
blooded romance from the sea, it is worth loafing 
along the Seattle wharves in the early autumn when 
the last steamers of the year are loading for Nome. 
It is a race with the ice that is already grinding off 
the distant and lonely coast they are hurrying to 
reach. Cargo fills their holds in roaring torrents of 
activity. When the last pound of freight that can be 
carried is shoved aboard the steamers, perhaps three 
or four of them turn northward with all the steam 
their straining boilers can stand up under. It is a 
gamble, with the chances of being nipped In the ice 
or being forced to turn back baffled. In the autumn 
of 1905 the gamblers lost, and one steamer which I 
saw go surging out of Seattle came limping back a 
month later, her cargo still under her hatches. 

192 



A Breath from Alaska 



An average of nine vessels a week, or almost five 
hundred a year, clear from American ports for 
Alaska, figures worth putting alongside the objec- 
tions of certain sapient Congressmen that it was a 
ridiculous waste of money to pay Russia $7,200,000 
for " an empty ice-box." The docks of Seattle tell 
another story. 

In this Puget Sound port one stands almost In the 
middle of the United States of this generation, for 
the Aleutian Islands stretch two thousand nine hun- 
dred miles west of Seattle, while Eastport, Maine, 
is about the same distance to the eastward. And some 
of us have to go west to learn that the sun is always 
shining somewhere in this new America, for when 
the June twilight falls on the gray waters of Behring 
Sea, the New England farmer is milking his cows 
in the early dawn. 

To Seattle come down from the mysterious North 
the weather-beaten prospectors and motley adven- 
turers who have won or lost in the struggle for 
gold. They lend to this bustling city of trolleys and 
skyscrapers a touch of the old frontier, and they 
seem to link the new world with the most primitive 
and picturesque order of things. You may be sitting 
at a table in a cafe as ostentatiously well-appointed 
as one of your Broadway haunts, and at your elbow is 
a sturdy pilgrim just landed from the frozen North, 
who is telling such a story as this, which floated across 
the table to me : 

193 



The Greater America 



" Wilkins was as brave and hardy a man as ever 
shouldered a pack and hunted for gold along the 
Copper River," began the narrator, J. S. Gordon. 
" He was the kind that would travel all day 
and never get peevish or done up, and he had 
a cheerful laugh and a good word for all hands, no 
matter how fast the trouble was coming. He was 
just one of that breed, big of mind and body, that 
seems built to rough it and take chances out-of-doors, 
and who would curl up and pine away cooped up in a 
city. No game was too stiff for him to go up against, 
until — but I am getting ahead of the day which fairly 
shriveled the soul of Charlie Wilkins and left him 
crushed and quiet and nervous until you pitied him 
and swore because you couldn't help him get back the 
courage and the bright temper that had been wrenched 
out of him for good and all. 

" It was in the month of February, and if you've 
been in Alaska you know what it means to be hauling 
your outfits up the Copper River on the ice. It 
wasn't exciting, just a terrible drudgery of fighting 
the cold and toiling along in the snow and faking up 
new dreams of gold somewhere ahead to keep you 
pegging along to God knows where. It was monoto- 
nous, hard, and without any end to it, and Charlie 
Wilkins was the only man who didn't wear the edge 
off his temper while he was hauling more pounds on 
his sled than any of the rest of us. 

" What happened to him came without any 
194 



A Breath from Alaska 



warning. We were shuffling along the river bed, 
when Charhe looked ahead and saw an open hole in 
the ice. He was thirsty, and he hustled on a little 
ahead and was glad to note that the ice was thin and 
the black water running close to the surface. This 
made it look easy for him to kneel down, unsling his 
tin cup from his belt and scoop up a drink. We were 
moving up to join him when, plop! the ice gave way 
and Wilkins vanished like a shot. There was no 
time for him to yell or wave an arm. He just 
dropped into the black water that swirled under the 
Ice and was carried out of sight before we could more 
than gasp and blink. 

" There wasn't one chance in a million that we 
could ever find poor Wilkins again, alive or dead. 
While we stood like dumb fools and glared at the 
hole he had dropped into, the swift current was 
rolling him under the ice like a log. But with a kind 
of frenzy we four scattered and ran down stream, 
stumbling in the snow, falling, scrambling, crying 
and swearing and calling to each other, 

" Every little way one of us, and then another, 
would fall to scraping a hole in the snow until he got 
down to the ice, to try to see through It and holler for 
Wilkins like a crazy man. Then we'd put an ear 
close to the Ice and listen, hoping to hear a yell from 
Wilkins. It wasn't reasonable, but we couldn't 
give him up without making a try, and if anybody 
in the world could best out a hideous game like 

195 



The Greater America 



this, it was this same Charlie Wilkins; we all knew 
that. 

" Ray Millard was plowing along about five hun- 
dred yards below the airhole where Wilkins had dis- 
appeared, when he thought he heard a faint cry from 
somewhere under his feet. He pricked up his ears 
and his hair stood on end, while he yelled for us to 
come and listen. We crowded around him with our 
mouths open, and there was a silence you could have 
cut with an ax while we waited for what seemed 
years and years. Then we all heard it repeated, a 
muffled cry for help, just a little, weak ghost of a 
cry, that seemed ever so far away. There was no 
doubt about it. We heard it again, and we knew that 
Wilkins was alive somewhere there underneath the 
ice. 

" We scattered a little, trying to locate it more 
definitely, and then we found ourselves circling back 
like a pack of hounds to where Millard was already 
flat on his belly, digging away at the ice with his 
sheath-knife. We had lost our ax coming up the 
river, and we were expecting to get another that 
night at camp we were heading for. So all we had 
to dig with was our heavy knives, and they were like 
toothpicks for the task in front of us. We flopped 
down in a bunch and began to chip away at that 
infernal ice, not knowing how many feet down we 
had to carve our way. Nobody said a word, just 
grunted and panted and dug and made the ice fly, 

196 



A Breath from Alaska 



and wondered whether we would ever see Charhe 
Wilklns again. It was almost worse in some ways 
than to have seen him drowned good and dead before 
your eyes. If he was still alive and could hear us 
trying to get at him, and he didn't hold out until we 
got a hole through — good God, man, think of what 
torture it meant for him and for us ! 

" Before long our hands began to bleed from the 
edges of the ice we were tearing at, and as the hole 
grew bigger a big crimson splotch appeared in the 
ice. But nobody stopped to tie up his hands or try to 
keep gloves on them. Now, you could not have made 
me believe that a bunch of men could cut down 
through two feet of ice with nothing but their knives, 
and do it in time to pull out a man beneath. But we 
were doing impossible things that day. 

" When we were a foot and a half down we were 
somewhere near the end of this incredible under- 
taking. We knew this because we could see the 
water running, and soon could hear the voice of 
Wilkins. 

" We stopped work for a minute, with our heads 
in the hole, and we could make out some of his words. 
He was asking us to listen, and then we heard him 
telling us that he couldn't hold out any longer, and 
he was bidding us each good-by by name. 

" The tears froze on our cheeks as we shouted 
back to him to hold on and we would soon have him 
out of there. But there was no response, and we 

197 



The Greater America 



were sure that he had drifted away to his death just 
as we were almost within reach. We fell to again, 
however, and it seemed as if we could never get 
through that last few inches. Then some man who 
had kept his wits from getting clean jumbled shouted 
back that we must scoop out the ice and make a big- 
ger hole before we broke through, because the water 
would rush in as soon as the ice was broken, and we 
couldn't fish Wilkins out if he was still in sight. So 
we hacked away until we had a hole big enough to 
let a man's body through and then our knives drove 
at the bottom all together and we broke through 
and almost slipped in ourselves, because we were 
hanging over the edge on our bellies. 

" The sled rope had been fetched and we made a 
loop and passed it down and around the body of what 
looked like a dead man doubled under there, with 
only his nose and mouth out of water. He was all 
In, and there seemed to be mighty little hope of doing 
anything more with him than digging another hole 
to bury him ashore. We put him on a sled, stripped 
and rubbed him, wrapped him up in furs, and filled 
him full of alcohol and Jamaica ginger and hot water 
as soon as we could make a fire. 

" The drink we threw into him would have made 
a corpse sit up and kick, and after a repetition of the 
dose, Wilkins actually opened his eyes. They were 
sunk 'way back in his head and he looked as If he had 
lost fifty pounds and aged as many years, his face 

198 



A Breath from Alaska 



was so wrinkled and white and drawn. Then we 
pushed along toward the camp we were hoping to 
make by nightfall and on the way Wilkins groaned 
and finally managed to sputter: 

" ' Boys, that was a close call.' 

" Next day he was up and weakly puttering around 
the camp, and trying to lend a hand at the cooking. 
But he had no strength in him, and he would just sit 
around most of the time and shiver for sheer nerv- 
ousness. As soon as he pulled himself together 
enough to tell us his end of the struggle under the 
ice, this is what we heard: 

" ' When the ice broke under me and I was spilled 
into the river, I touched bottom with my feet and 
dragged them along over the rocks trying to brace 
myself while the current pulled me along. There 
was room for me to keep my head above water, but 
in no time I had been dragged down past the hole I 
had made and was under the ice. But I could see 
the light that filtered through the hole behind me and 
I tried to get back to it. 

" ' I think I could have made it even against the 
current, but for the weight of the big cake of Ice 
that had broken off with me and which was butting 
against my chest and forcing me down stream. It 
pushed me back step by step, the light getting fainter 
all the time. I felt my last chance for life was In 
fighting my way back to the hole, and as the light 
died out and I went stumbling and kicking down 

199 



The Greater America 



stream an inch at a time, I thought it was all over 
with Charlie Wilkins. 

" ' This seemed like dying slow and hard but the 
worst was yet to come. The cake of ice that was 
shoving me down stream was as cruel and in- 
fernally active as if it had been alive. Whenever 
Td get a foothold on the bottom and begin to think 
I could make a step toward the light, the cake of ice 
would hand me one in the chest or beat my head 
down under water and I'd have to give up and fight 
for breath and a chance to get my head above water 
again. Finally I had to let go, I was getting so 
weak that I couldn't brace myself for another effort, 
and the cake of ice swung me clean around, I lost 
my footing, and was whirled down stream like a chip, 
rolling over and over. 

" ' Somehow I managed to keep the water from 
getting into my lungs, for I held my breath until I was 
on the point of blowing up, and then my head would 
bob out of water and bump against the roof of the 
river and be forced under again. Now and then my 
feet would get a hold for a minute and I would try 
to brace back and turn, but it was no use. Once I 
fetched up against a boulder but it was too slippery 
to cling to and I was too weak to get much of a wrap 
around it. What was I thinking about? Nothing 
except that I had a mighty few seconds left to live 
and that it was up to me to make a last kick or two 
and die with some self-respect because I'd done my 

200 



A Breath from Alaska 



best right up to the finish. Also it struck me as a 
poor kind of a joke to play on a man — this fooling 
with him like a cat with a mouse. 

" ' Just about that time my feet struck bottom 
again and I clawed at the ice overhead and one hand 
caught in a little fissure or crack. I held fast for a 
moment, got the other hand up and squeezed an arm 
Into the crack pretty near up to my elbow. I dug 
my heels into the gravel, and hung there, while the 
water sucked at me and was pulling me down. But 
by holding my mouth close to the ice I could breathe 
and I got a little bit of strength back, and my arm 
half fast in the crack and I was anchored, but God 
only knew for how long, and it seemed to be no better 
than dragging the agony out anyhow. But I hung 
on, you bet, though it did seem most foolish. 

" ' I yelled as loud as I could as soon as my wind 
came back, though it seemed as silly a stunt as shout- 
ing from the Copper River to draw the attention of 
a friend on Broadway. Then my arm would slip and 
my heart would freeze up with thinking the end had 
come, and I'd claw for a fresh hold, and my chin 
would dip under water and strangle, and the fight for 
breath would begin again. I was yelling for help 
whenever I could, but I didn't expect any help, that's 
the curious part of it. I knew that the ice must be 
two or three feet thick, and I remembered that the 
gang had no axe handy, and I had no notion that my 
voice would carry through the ice. 

201 



TJie Greater America 



" ' I don't know how long I hung there and went 
through all this useless circus, but after a long, long 
while I heard a faint tap, tap. I thought it must be 
inside my head, but I yelled some more. And after 
another century or so, it seemed as if a pale patch of 
light was coming through the ice into the black dark- 
ness above me. The tappings sounded nearer, and 
I guessed that the boys had located me and were try- 
ing to get at me by digging at the ice with their 
knives. 

" ' I was numb and dead all over by this time, and 
had lost all feeling of cold or pain, although my neck 
was straining nearly double, like a busted hinge, to 
keep my mouth clear of the water. I was near the 
end of my rope. I knew I could hold out only sec- 
onds longer, and I tried to yell again. This time I 
got an answer. I could hear voices over my head 
and I understood they were telling me to keep up 
courage and hold on and they would get me out. 

The news came too late to brace me up. I felt 
calm and clear-headed and faced death without any 
more thought of fighting it. I was sure the boys 
could not reach me in time, for my arm was slipping 
again and my legs were too far gone to hold me up 
against the current. I tried to figure out how much 
longer It would take to get through the remainder of 
the ice, but It seemed hopeless. 

" ' So I said good-by to each of the boys, though T 
couldn't see them — but they could hear me. I told 

202 



A Breath from Alaska 



them that in my clothes bag I had a httle sack of 
gold-dust which they were to send back to my wife in 
the States, and I sent a message to her. Then I went 
off to sleep, and had a few mixed-up thoughts of 
home and one thing or another, such as you float away 
into dreamland with, and I thought I heard the tap- 
ping and digging again, but it was all very faint and 
far away.' 

" That was the end of Charlie Wilkins," concluded 
Gordon, " until he came to with a jolt of raw alcohol 
surging through his system like a prairie fire." 



203 



CHAPTER XV 

ALONG PACIFIC WATER-FRONTS 

The steam-schooner, a vessel whose build and habits 
are peculiar to the Pacific, often goes to sea " with 
her load-line over her hatch." Which means, that 
after her hold has been crammed with cargo, a deck- 
load of lumber is piled half way up the masts, so that 
her skipper puts out with the water washing green 
over his main deck, and an occasional comber frisking 
across his battened hatches. 

Along the harbor front of Seattle runs the story 
of a passenger who loped down to the wharf in a 
hurry to get aboard a departing steam-schooner. He 
balanced himself on the stringpiece for an instant, 
looked down at what little he could see of the laden 
craft, and hove his grip-sack down the only opening 
in sight. He was about to dive after it when a 
lounger on the wharf shouted : 

" Hi, there ! Where do you think you're jumpin' 
to ? That's the smoke-stack you tossed your baggage 
down." 

" What ! " gasped the passenger, " I thought it 
was the hatch." 

The yarn has a slight flavor of exaggeration, 
but it may serve to hint that the commerce of the 
Pacific has ways of its own. Until recently another 

204 



Along Pacific Water-Fronts 



distinctive feature of this shipping was that there 
seemed so very little of it for so vastly much water. 
Six years ago I crossed the Pacific, bound out of San 
Francisco for China. The Stars and Stripes had 
been in the Philippines for two years, and much big 
talk was stirring about "American expansion" toward 
the Orient. But even then such dreams had no more 
than begun to materialize. 

That expanse of ocean seemed as empty of shipping 
as when Sir Francis Drake crossed it in chase of the 
galleons of Spain, three centuries ago. We steamed 
three weeks without sighting sail or smoke. Our 
vessel was the Rio Janeiro, an ancient iron kettle 
which would have been rated as hardly fast enough 
or stanch enough for the coastwise passenger trade 
between New York and Florida. A few months 
later she struck a rock In San Francisco harbor, 
crumpled up like an old hat, and carried nearly two 
hundred souls to the bottom in twenty minutes. 

At that time, however, she was considered good 
enough to be called a " Pacific liner," along with such 
other nautical relics as the old City of Peking and the 
Peru. The Pacific Mall had one first-class ship in 
commission, the China. An allied company operated 
three White Star boats, which in course of time had 
been found too small and slow for the Atlantic pas- 
senger service. It had been left to the Japanese to 
fly their flag over three fine new steamers of me- 
dium size and yacht-like smartness that plied out of 

205 



The Greater America 



San Francisco, and from Seattle the same hustling 
Orientals had put on a regular service in connection 
with the Great Northern Railway. 

Recently revisiting the western coast, I found the 
signs of a swift and inspiring growth, which may be 
glimpsed in these bristling figures : 

In 1897 the total tonnage of American steam ves- 
sels engaged in the Pacific Ocean was 23,426 ; in 1905 
it had increased to 149,685, by which time more 
vessels in foreign trade were owned in Washington 
than in any other State of the Union. 

From Seattle now sail the magnificent steamers 
Minnesota and Dakota, built for James J. Hill, which 
would loom as giants on the swarming Atlantic and 
from San Francisco steams the new fleet of majestic 
liners of the Korea and Manchuria class, created by 
the Pacific Mail. Out of Tacoma voyage westward 
the new ships of the Boston Steamship Company; the 
China Mutual Navigation Company has invaded the 
field with a monthly line from Puget Sound to Liver- 
pool and Glasgow, via Oriental ports, and the Ger- 
mans are building up a new service out of Portland. 
Besides these regular lines, unattached freighters 
under steam and sail are hurrying to and from these 
ports in greater fleets each year. Far to the south- 
ward the breakwater at San Pedro stretches out a 
mighty arm to shelter the coming squadrons of com- 
merce. New ships are building to meet new de- 
mands, and yet with almost every voyage the liners 

206 



Along Pacific Water-Fronts 



leave behind them waiting cargoes for which they 
have no space, whose bulk is measured by hundreds 
of carloads. In the first half of a recent year ten 
ships were filled with freight left behind by steamers 
out of Seattle and Tacoma. 

Compared with what it is to be, however, this 
traffic, like the new empire of the coast it serves, is a 
lusty infant able to sit up and kick. The Pacific is 
even now an ocean the richness of whose argosies will 
be revealed to future generations and other centuries. 
This was one of the impressions gleaned from the 
tossing deck of a San Francisco pilot schooner cruis- 
ing to seaward of the oldest and most populous port 
of the long Pacific coast. I recalled the stately col- 
umns of ocean craft that daily move past Sandy 
Hook, homeward bound and outward bound, their 
signal bunting fluttering the names of ports in all the 
Seven Seas, and how on "steamer" days the liners file 
out through the Narrows, crowding at each other's 
agile heels, or flock in from the Atlantic, by day and 
night, like express trains on a crowded schedule. 

The pilot schooner Grade S., off the Golden Gate, 
was not compelled to dodge any such traffic as this. 
She might reach out to the Farallones and back to the 
lightship, or reel hove to on the deep-bosomed Pacific 
swell for two or three days on end without once trim- 
ming sail to meet an incoming vessel from "blue 
water." 

This pilot service differs from that of Atlantic 
207 



The Greater America 



ports in that no apprentices are trained to take the 
places of their elders. The men that cruise off the 
Golden Gate are chosen from among the veteran 
shipmasters who have commanded big vessels, under 
steam and sail, in many waters of the world. There- 
fore they know not only the harbors of their own 
coast, but also the ways of ships and the sea at large. 
To cruise with a crew of these pilots was to gain a 
more vivid acquaintance with the shipping of the 
Pacific than could be picked up in browsing along 
water-fronts and juggling with tonnage statistics. 

For it is one thing to read in the Shipping Gazette 
that " the American ship Wanderer, a hundred and 
thirty days from New York, was reported yesterday," 
and quite another to have seen her backing her main 
yard for a pilot outside the Golden Gate. First, her 
royals lifted from the empty sea like a gleaming fleck 
of cloud. Then one by one her foreyards climbed 
into view until, when the snowy fabric towered clear 
of the horizon, she was a picture of surpassing beauty 
that stirred the imagination to recall a vanishing 
story of one kind of commerce on the Pacific whose 
climax was reached nearly half a century ago. 

The sails of the Wanderer were patched in many 
places, but the lines of her wooden hull were of more 
graceful mold than can be found in the cargo carriers 
of to-day. One of the last of the American sailing 
ships, the Wanderer belonged with the past, just as 
the great Pacific liner and the wallowing, wall-sided 

208 



Along Pacific Water-Fronts 



tramp foreshadow the commercial expansion of the 
future. The time was when Cape Horn cHppers and 
packets swept through the Golden Gate in such noble 
fleets as have never since sailed under the American 
flag. At the height of the gold excitement of the 
fifties the harbor of San Francisco held more shipping 
than have ever the ports of Liverpool or New York. 
The present generation is apt to fancy that creating 
a commerce on the Pacific is a new thing, for it is 
easy to forget that it was the Pacific trade which for 
many years pushed the Stars and Stripes to the front 
of the merchant marine of the world, a prestige lost 
so long ago that even its memories are fading. 

Where one lonely Wanderer signals for a pilot, a 
score of hard-driven Yankee clippers once surged in 
from over seas. Now, when British and German 
ships are carrying the wheat and the lumber and the 
manufactured products of America across every ocean, 
it sounds like a fairy tale to read of American fleets 
which have never been excelled for speed, power and 
beauty; of the clipper Flying Cloud, which in a fair, 
strong breeze could run away from the steam liners 
of her time, of the Sovereign of the Seas, the Flying 
Fish, the Phantom, the Shooting Star, the Westward 
Ho and the Bald Eagle, all peerless in their day. 

They belonged with the time when California, 
Australia and Oregon were first opening to trade. 
" The merchant who could get the fastest ship had 
the market for the fruits of the Mediterranean, for 

209 



The Greater America 



the rugs of Smyrna, for the silks of India and the 
teas of China, and suppHed the new States of which 
the Anglo-Saxon race was then laying the founda- 
tions. When John Bull came floating into San Fran- 
cisco or Sydney or Melbourne he used to find Uncle 
Sam sitting carelessly, with his legs dangling from the 
dock, smoking his pipe, with his cargo sold and his 
pockets full of money. The flag of the United States 
was a flower that adorned every port." 

There is no oratorical exaggeration in this briny 
eulogy. For example, the log of the medium clipper 
Florence, one thousand tons, records that in a voyage 
from Shanghai to England, in 1859, when seventeen 
days out, she exchanged signals with the English ship 
John Masterman, which had sailed thirteen days 
before her. 

The shining prestige of those times was due to the 
Yankee skipper as well as the Yankee hull. They 
carried sail and held on to their spars when foreign 
ships were reefed down snug. It was this same 
Florence clipper that " passed two barks under reefed 
courses and close-reefed topsails standing the same 
way — we with royals and topgallant studding sails." 

List, ye landsmen, also, to an incident in the career 
of the immortal Sovereign of the Seas. Built by the 
famous Donald McKay, and sailed by his gallant 
brother Lauchlan, she left New York for San Fran- 
cisco in August, 1 85 1. Off Valparaiso she was al- 
most wholly dismasted in a storm carrying away 

210 



Along Pacific Water-Fronts 



everything on the fore- and mainmasts above the 
lower mastheads. In two weeks Captain Lauchlan 
McKay had fitted out his crippled vessel with so mar- 
velous a jury rig that he reached San Francisco in one 
hundred and two days from New York, which was 
recorded as " the best passage ever made for the 
season." 

Mostly under foreign flags, the square rigger still 
plies the Pacific, no longer clipper built, but a bluff- 
bowed, clumsy, fuU-waisted tank jammed full of 
cargo, with small thought of speed. As for the 
famous Yankee sea-skimmers, a few of them may be 
found cut down to melancholy hulks and doing duty 
as barges towing up and down the Pacific coast, or, 
with spread of spars sadly reduced, tumbling slug- 
gishly with the salmon and grain fleets, like worn-out 
thoroughbreds impressed as cart horses. 

But even the cheaply built and cheaply manned 
steel sailing ships of the foreigner must struggle to 
compete with the big-bellied tramp steamer. The 
solitary Wanderer was not alone in her departing 
glory. She was luckier than many of her sisters. As 
our pilot schooner tacked past Sausalito, outward 
bound, there lifted into view a fleet of a dozen rusting 
sailing ships tucked away In a pocket of the harbor. 
They had been laid up In costly idleness, some of 
them for two and three years, waiting for charters. 
Said Pilot "Jimmy" Hayes: 

" I've seen twenty of these deep-water ships lying 

211 



The Greater America 



over there at one time, eating their heads off year 
after year until you'd think their plates would rust 
through. A while ago I took one of them to sea, a 
German bark that had been waiting two years to 
get a charter. The skipper had tarried so long that 
he had sent out to Germany and fetched his old 
mother to 'Frisco to keep him company. He told 
me his hard-luck story: how at last he had got a 
grain charter out of Portland and had drawn eleven 
thousand dollars from home, all he had in the world, 
to refit his vessel for sea. He worked on my sympa- 
thies, telling me how near broke he was and how 
much he had at stake, and persuaded me to let him 
down easy on his pilotage charges. He was between 
the devil and the deep sea, that Dutchman, and there 
are lots more like him, only they don't bring their 
old mothers along to make us feel sorry for them." 

Awakening a different kind of sentiment was the 
sight of an army transport signaling farewell to the 
station at the Golden Gate as she straightened out 
on her course for Manila. While the East has almost 
forgotten that troops still say farewell to mothers 
and sweethearts and wives at the transport docks, to 
sail away to years of exile In the islands of the Orient, 
the Pacific coast still thrills to these stirring episodes. 

" I was commander of the steamer St. Paul while 
she was a transport on the Philippine run," said Cap- 
tain Hayes, " and I'll swear I feel the prickles up and 
down my back to this day when I see one of those 

212 



Along Pacific Water-Fronts 



vessels leaving harbor with a regiment of soldiers 
crowding along her rail, and the band playing, and 
the old flag snapping in the wind. I got my first 
thrill at Manila. I had a Tennessee regiment of 
volunteers on board, homeward bound, at the time 
when there was a lot of fighting in the islands. We 
steamed out past the Olympia, as close as I dared 
shove my ship. The band on the flagship was playing 
the ' Star-Spangled Banner,' and every blue-jacket 
stood at attention with his cap in his hand. The 
thousand infantrymen on my vessel let out a yell you 
could have heard in Manila. 

" Admiral Dewey was standing on the quarter- 
deck, and he bowed, of course. But just then the 
flagship band swung into ' Dixie,' and our band took 
it up, and they played it together, and, good Lord, 
if you ever heard men really yell, it was those thou- 
sand lads from Tennessee! The Admiral threw his 
cap as high as he could toss it, and didn't give a hang 
whether it came down on deck or over side. And 
that's the way we left the Philippines. 

" Why, I got a lump in my throat the other day 
when I happened to be down on the dock to see a 
transport start from 'Frisco. A regular regiment 
was outward bound, and the dock was jammed with 
folks come down to say good-by. Half the town was 
there, as if it was something new to see a transport 
pull out. There were cheers and tears, and just as 
the vessel swung clear of the dock the band led off, 

213 



The Greater America 



and a thousand men in khaki sung all together, 
' Good-by, Little Girl, Good-by.' 

" They say sailors are kind of sloppy weather when 
it comes to sentiment, but it did beat going to hear 
an opera just to hear those boys sing ' Good-by, Little 
Girl, Good-by.' " 



214 



CHAPTER XVI 

ON THE PILOT SCHOONER'S DECK 

While the Grade S. was cruising off the Golden 
Gate there was much time for yarning of ships and 
sailors. When the wind rose and the green rollers 
put on their bonnets of foam, a reef was tucked in 
the mainsail of the stanch schooner, her jib hauled 
to windward, and she lay to with no more attention 
from her crew. Then in her little cockpit, whose 
rail was a shelter against the spray that stormed from 
forward, or down in the roomy cabin, the pilots three 
smoked and talked and waited (with the large pa- 
tience that belongs to sailors and fishermen and pros- 
pectors) for the summons of the watch on deck to 
" board off " when a vessel should be sighted. 

There were always shifting backgrounds in har- 
mony with the random chat that seldom veered from 
salty topics. Sleek and dog-like seals poked their 
heads from the lazy swells alongside, and stared 
curiously before they ducked under again. The 
brown and white gulls that nest on the rocky Faral- 
lones hovered astern almost within arm's reach, or 
swam close to the schooner's counter while they 
waited for the cook to come on deck with a pan of 
scraps. Pilots and seamen might bob up through the 

215 



The Greater America 



companion hatch and go below without a sign of 
agitation among the astute gulls. But let the white 
apron of the cook appear on deck, and there was 
clamorous commotion among these eager and auda- 
cious guests. A flourish of his arm made them fairly 
hysterical with excitement, and when he tossed his 
garbage overboard a score of gulls were flying and 
crying around him, ready to catch the morsels the 
instant they fell into the sea. It Is not too venture- 
some an assertion that these Pacific gulls knew the 
meal hours aboard the Grade S., and if breakfast was 
late they began to protest with creaking cries and 
impatient, fluttering flights. 

Four-masted coasting schooners now and then 
slipped into the Golden Gate, bound from Puget 
Sound ports. They were lumber laden, and their 
deck loads were of a top-heavy height to afflict an 
Atlantic coasting skipper with nervous prostration. 
They were in accord with the spirit of Pacific naviga- 
tion, which is " to load 'em deep and take chances." 
A big tramp, coal laden, came waddling in from 
British Columbia. There was no more than a fine 
sailing breeze, but when this sluggish Germanicus 
swung in to pick her way through the North Channel, 
the sea was slopping over her well deck fore and 
aft. She appeared to be on the point of foundering, 
but she was no more than making good weather of it 
with a full cargo. 

A slim black schooner, heavily sparred, and tearing 
216 



On the Pilot Schooner s Deck 

along like a racing yacht, slid out of the Golden 
Gate and laid a course a little south of west. There 
were brown-skinned sailors on her deck, and she 
smacked of the trade winds and the South Seas. 

" She's one of the few island traders left," said a 
pilot. " There's a bit of life that's almost gone from 
the San Francisco water-front. A dozen years ago 
you could find the island schooners in here by the 
dozen, the kind you read about in Stevenson's bully 
yarn of ' The Wrecker.' But the beach-comber and 
the Kanaka sailor and the fast schooner chock full of 
trade for the benighted islander have slipped away 
from the American, who didn't hustle enough to keep 
up with the Germans. It's the Dutchmen that have 
captured the South Sea business, just as they have 
scuppered us in the deep-water cargo trade and 
have made the English look sick in the race for the 
commerce of the Orient." 

The schooner bound for the Marshall Islands was 
no sooner hull down than a French ship four months 
out from Hamburg hove in sight, heading for the 
light-ship. Her string of signal flags showed that she 
wanted to talk to a pilot. The Grade S. was expect- 
ing this stately square-rigger, because the ship's agent 
In San Francisco had sent orders which he wished 
delivered to the skipper before he could haul in for 
the Golden Gate. The pilot schooner shook out a 
reef, and sped off to meet the Frenchman. Her red- 
capped crew was cheerily tidying ship, for port was In 

217 



The Greater America 



sight. At sight of the pilot boat they dropped their 
tasks, and tailed on to the weather clew of the main- 
sail. From the deck rose the hurricane voice of the 
mate: 

" Weather main brace," and then, " Let go the lee 
main brace." 

The main yard swung slowly aback, the big ship 
lost headway, and lay waiting for the pilot, who, the 
skipper expected, was hurrying to take him into port. 
But alas ! the envelope delivered from the agent in 
the San Francisco office held orders to proceed to 
Portland to discharge her cargo. 

" By Gar, it means anozzer month at sea," bawled 
the sallow skipper, as he stamped his quarter-deck in 
rage and disappointment. " Anozzer month of beat- 
ing up coast, an' God knows how long waiting off 
ze bar." 

The pilot sympathized and made haste to escape. 
Even the ship seemed to sulk. For an hour she lay 
off the lightship, her main yard aback, before her 
crew fell to work, and she swung slowly on her way. 
It was easy to imagine the gloom streaked with the 
most vivid profanity which filled the weary ship from 
cabin to forecastle. Within sight of the Golden Gate, 
to be ordered to sea again after months of solitary 
wandering half around the world was like being 
turned back at your own gate, and within sight of the 
lights in your own home window, after a long, long 
absence. 

218 




The pilot boat at sea 

I. Yarni'^.g in the cockpit. 2. Taking in sail. 3. On her station. 
4. " Heave ho !" on the anchor. 




o 



On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 

The disheartened wayfarer, with her splendid 
spread of gleaming canvas, was swooping hull down 
to the northward like a great gull, when a smudge of 
smoke showed against the tumbling green sea to the 
westward. 

" The Siberia," cried a pilot. " I said she would 
show up at nine o'clock this morning. It's a little 
after eight, and she'll be abreast of the light-ship in 
less than an hour." 

His guess was right to a dot. The great liner, fit 
type of a new era in the life of the wide Pacific, was 
racing for home from the far-away Orient so close 
to her schedule that her arrival could be timed as 
accurately as if she were a transcontinental express. 
Against another quarter of the horizon the square- 
rigger was dropping hull down, bearing with her an 
outlived age of romance on the sea. The liner, with 
her trailing column of smoke, the cargo of a dozen 
clippers stowed in her cavernous holds, and the 
strength of ten thousand horses driving her against 
wind and weather, brought the message of the new 
age of the Mind in the Machine. Her giant bulk 
lost headway, she picked up her pilot, who crawled 
up her tall side like a fly on the wall, and five minutes 
later the huge steel fabric was crashing through the 
swell to finish her run into the Golden Gate, a link 
between the oldest and newest civilizations, that lie 
five thousand miles apart in distance but only a few 
days in time. 

219 



The Greater America 



Captain John Wallace, now a pilot on the Grade 
S., had seen as much of the two eras of steam and 
sail as a man In his prime could be expected to know. 
He first went to sea at the precocious age of six 
months, for his mother was the wife of a down-east 
shipmaster from Thomaston, Maine. When barely 
out of his teens this thoroughbred Yankee seaman was 
master of a deep-water vessel, and for eight years com- 
manded one of the few fine big sailing ships that hail 
from Maine. His shipmate, Captain Jimmy Hayes, 
had been master of vessels in the Alaska trade when 
the gold stampedes to that wonderful country were in 
full flight. He carried the frenzied argonauts north 
to the crowded beach of Nome, and to Skagway, 
when many skippers were facing hazards as startling 
as any of the perils undergone by the gold seekers. 
For the sorriest fleet of patched and painted cofl'ins 
that ever masqueraded as sea-going vessels was assem- 
bled to reap the fat harvest of the Alaska coast. Any- 
thing that would float and turn over an engine was 
pressed into service, and the story of the North Pacific 
includes a picturesque and tragic tally of ships that 
had no plausible excuse for staying afloat. Even now 
when an ancient liner drops from the list of the 
Atlantic trade because of sheer decrepitude it is not 
to be concluded that she has been sent to the marine 
bone yard. Two to one she will turn up with a new 
name and a fresh coat of paint in the Alaska trade. 

One evening aboard the Grade S. the merits of 
220 



On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 

the Chinese and the Japanese as sailors drifted into 
the discussion. 

With a tone of profound regret in his voice, Cap- 
tain Wallace observed : 

" This boat has never been the same since Bennie 
left. Who was Bennie? Just a wizened, cock-eyed 
Chinaman, cook of the Grade S. for seven years. He 
left us last cruise, just packed up his duffle and went 
ashore. All Chinamen look alike to you, eh? Well, 
that's because you didn't know Bennie. He was a 
down-east, New England Chinaman. Old Captain 
Scribner, a Maine skipper, picked Bennie up when he 
was six years old and raised him by hand. He grew 
up as good an American as you ever clapped eyes on. 
He could pull a rope, stand a trick at the wheel, work 
fifteen hours a day and cook like a wizard. We 
couldn't get along without him, and then he up and 
quit us because the Scandinavian foremast hands made 
some remarks about his grub. His cooking was too 
good for them, that was the matter. Bennie stood it 
a little while, and then came to me and told me that 
he liked Yankees, because he was one of us, and 
would stand anything we had a mind to say about his 
menu, but he'd be jiggered if he'd stand any observa- 
tions from those foreigners forward, meaning the 
* square-heads.' " 

" That's right, Johnny," broke in Captain Hayes; 
" Chinamen are good men afloat, but I haven't much 
use for Japs. Why, I took in a Maru boat the other 

221 



The Greater America 



day, and the chief engineer, who was an Englishman, 
was giving me his opinion of Japs as sailors. He 
had the evidence to back it up, too. We know they're 
slow and lazy, but did you know that they're man- 
eaters? This engineer was all bandaged up. He 
said the back of his hands and the front of his legs 
were chewed up as if a menagerie had broken adrift 
in the cargo. There had been a lively scrap in the fire 
room, and when he sailed in to clear the place, his 
Jap stokers and trimmers turned on him and chewed 
him up, according to their own style of fighting. 
Now wouldn't that make you sick Men calling 
themselves sailors with habits like that ! " 

I asked for tales of personal adventure and was Ill- 
rewarded, for men who live amid strong and hazard- 
ous deeds are not easily led to talk about themselves. 

" We have some rough times off here in the win- 
ter," said Captain Hayes, " when the southeasterly 
gales blow up. It isn't freezing weather, like Atlantic 
cruising, but It blows hard enough to break the light- 
ship adrift every winter or so, and she manages to 
clear Race Point somehow when she blows to the 
northward. She'll go ashore some time and there'll 
be a lively story for you. Which reminds me of the 
time when the reporter asked Gus, the Norwegian 
foremast hand, for an adventure story. 

" ' I vas upset sometimes In de yawl, boarding off 
steamers in bad wedder,' said Gus, willing to oblige. 
' Last vinter de yawl turned over und de udder feller 

222 



On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 

vas drownded. I vas in de vater an hour, und I got 
pooty vet. Dot's all, I tink.' 

" Seafaring life on this coast isn't so much what 
you get into as what you manage to steer clear of," 
Captain Hayes continued. " The pilots and ship- 
masters are blamed for a lot of disasters, but there's 
two sides to the question. San Francisco harbor, for 
example, is a mean place to handle a vessel. The 
currents shift over night and the fog shuts down like 
a blanket. Then we have to smell our way and often 
steer by the echo of the fog whistles against the rocks, 
and steering by echoes isn't all plain sailing, if you've 
ever tried it. Why don't we anchor and wait? fVe 
do, but it's often against the wishes of the shipmaster, 
and back of him is the owner, crazy to take chances 
and make time. Most ships lost along the Pacific 
coast go ashore because the master is hugging the 
points and doubling the headlands instead of giving 
himself plenty of sea room, all to gain a little time 
and save a few tons of coal. 

" And I've taken many a steamer to sea when her 
compasses were no more use for steering by than a 
cat's tail in the dark. Her owner had given the skip- 
per no time to swing his ship in port and adjust his 
compasses, and he went blundering out to sea, shaving 
the coast, his compass behaving like a drunken sailor. 
Then when he loses his ship, he's most likely 
ruined for life, if he's lucky enough to escape 
being drowned." 

223 



The Greater America 



*' Right you are, Jimmy," said Captain Wallace. 
" And folks ashore think the compass always points 
north and south. If they want to signify the straight, 
honest goods, they'll say ' true as the needle to the 
pole.' As a matter of fact, the compass points almost 
any other old way by preference. Think of all the 
kinks you have to look out for. For instance, do you 
know there is less compass deviation aboard a steel 
ship if she's laid down north and south in the building 
yard? It's true. Her hull becomes magnetized by 
the pounding of the riveters on her plates. This 
wears out of a ship in time. I once boarded a new 
steel steamer, and her captain said, while he was 
showing me his compasses: 

" ' She's getting better all the time. It will wear 
out of her in two or three more voyages. If she'd 
laid down east and west, the deflection would be much 
worse.' You might have thought he was telling me 
about a horse he was breaking to harness. Funny, 
isn't it?" 

" Yes," said Captain Jimmy, " it's one more nut 
for the poor shipmaster to crack. It's bad enough 
to have to allow for deviation caused by cargo. Even 
coal has played the devil with lots of compasses and 
wrecked more than one fine vessel on this coast. 
There's enough iron in several thousand tons of coal 
to get on the nerves of the compass, and I once saw 
a ship get clean off her course because the man at the 
wheel had a jackknife in his pocket." 

224 



On the Pilot Schooner s Deck 

Within the last half century hundreds of stout 
vessels have piled up on the rocky heads between 
Puget Sound and San Diego, many of them over- 
loaded and undermanned. Contrasted with this black 
record is the story of the pilot schooner of the 
Golden Gate, which is almost the last of her kind. 
She has already vanished from the offing of New 
York harbor and the Delaware Capes, where steam 
has retired these stout-hearted little vessels. Through 
the storms of two generations, while big ships and 
steamers were adding their names to the list of Pacific 
disasters, these schooners have fought through heavy 
weather and clawed off lee shores. 

Only two of them have been lost since the fleets 
of the Cape Horn clippers brought them into being. 
Five years ago the Bonita was rammed by a whale 
while at sea, and the sternpost ripped out of her. 
Her crew had barely time to pitch their yawls over 
and escape with what they stood in before she went 
to the bottom. Thirty years ago, the Caleb Cushing 
capsized while crossing the bar in a southeast gale. 
She turned over end for end and all hands were lost 
in this fatal somersault. Neither disaster could be 
blamed to poor seamanship or lack of stanchness in 
the lost vessels. They are examples of honest ship- 
building to-day. It was the Grade S. that missed 
stays in a strong tide, and crashed fourteen feet into 
a San Francisco wharf without starting a plank of 
her hull. As for the seas that break over the bar 

225 



The Greater America 



when big winds blow and the pilot schooners are 
scudding for home, Captain Jimmy Hayes can tell 
you stories like this : 

" I was taking out a big English tramp when there 
was some weather on the bar. Three seas broke clean 
over her bridge. The captain and the mate took to 
the rigging and left me by my lonesome. I couldn't 
persuade 'em to come down from their perches until 
we were in the channel again. They swore the ves- 
sel was foundering. They looked kind of ridiculous 
spraddled out in the shrouds. Yes, it's a bad bar at 
times." 

When all three pilots had forsaken the Grade S. 
to board the vessels they were seeking, the little 
schooner was left in charge of her grizzled boat- 
keeper, who had sailed in these craft for more than 
thirty years. We headed homeward with a fair wind 
and slipped past the rugged portals of the Golden 
Gate into one of the fairest harbors in all the world. 
The greatest city of the Far West was purpled in 
twilight that shadowed its protecting hills. Along 
the water-front were clustered the spars and stacks 
of vessels loading for the ports of the Orient, Alaska, 
the South Seas and Hawaii. 

And beyond the wharves and the city stretched the 
unseen railroads, fighting the most dramatic indus- 
trial conflict of to-day for the victors' share of the 
Pacific commerce that bulks so big in reckoning with 
the future of American enterprise. Half a century 

226 



On the Pilot Schooner's Deck 

ago William H. Seward read the signs aright when 
he said: 

" The Pacific Ocean, with its shores, its islands and 
the vast region beyond will become the chief theater 
of events in the world's great hereafter." 

Building fleets is only one factor in the present 
struggle for expansion. Far back of the firing line 
are the leaders of the opposing forces, James J. Hill 
and E. H. Harriman. They have spent half a billion 
dollars in a decade. They have rebuilt the trans- 
continental railway system, and their competition has 
reduced freight rates thirty per cent. They have 
made cities, bridged seas, tunneled mountains, and 
achieved feats of engineering and executive daring 
unequaled in industrial development. Mr. Hill has 
said of his controlling ambition: 

" I have been charged with everything, from being 
an ' Oriental dreamer ' to a crank, but I am ready at 
all times to plead guilty to any intelligent effort within 
my power that will result in getting new markets for 
what we produce in the northwestern country." 

He has made his dreams come true. Seattle was 
a straggling seaside town when he put his railroad 
into it. Since that time the Puget Sound ports have 
become mighty rivals of San Francisco for ocean 
traffic, and the older city at the Golden Gate has seen 
them increase their tonnage by leaps and bounds, 
and at her expense. 

If you would be Impressed by a final proof that 
227 



The Greater America 



the dreamers of yesterday are the builders of to-day, 
you should see one of J. J. Hill's new steamers 
loading for Japan and China and Manila, and then 
recall the kind of liners that were on the Pacific a few 
years ago. The Minnesota or Dakota swallows 
thirty thousand tons of cargo, which is the burden 
of five hundred freight cars. They carry three thou- 
sand passengers when the lists are full. Their ton- 
nage is twenty-two thousand, or six thousand tons 
greater than any other vessel in the Pacific trade. 
And looking a little further backward, one finds that 
the Minnesota is almost twenty times larger than the 
far-famed clipper of the age of sail, whose titanic 
heir she is to the commerce of the Pacific. 

A century ago a Salem bark of only two hundred 
tons (a hundred of her 'like could be stowed in the 
holds of the Minnesota or Dakota) made one of the 
first voyages around the Horn to the new Northwest 
coast. She mounted eight guns, and her cargo con- 
sisted of " broadcloth, flannel, blankets, powder, mus- 
kets, watches, tools, beads and looking-glasses," for 
trading with the painted natives. On a recent voy- 
age the Minnesota carried to the Orient seventy loco- 
motives, more than a hundred railway cars, ten 
thousand kegs of wire nails, and half a million dol- 
lars' worth of hardware, machinery, flour and other 
products of the mills, the mines, the farms and the 
factories, that, even from the far-away Atlantic coast, 
seek new outlets toward the setting sun. 

228 



CHAPTER XVII 

TWENTIETH CENTURY ARGONAUTS 

Forty gold dredgers working in the heart of the 
storied land of the Forty-niner! 

There could be no more melodramatic contrast 
between Past and Present, between the age of Man 
and the age of the Machine. 

Then, the hardy argonauts with hearts of oak, who 
toiled and sweated and roistered and starved in the 
Sacramento Valley and the Sierras, packing their gold 
pans and rockers on their backs; now, the huge ma- 
chine, devastating, incredibly industrious, that makes 
play of doing the work of hundreds of men in a day. 

The argonauts skimmed the cream of the placer 
diggings and spent their gold and died. After them 
came hordes of Chinese, who reaped a second harvest 
from the same country. Hydraulic mining followed, 
and had its era, and then placer mining seemed a dying 
industry in the region Bret Harte peopled for the joy 
of nations with such heroic figures as Jack Oakhurst 
and Colonel Starbottle. The gold seekers turned to 
other fields afar, to the Klondike and South Africa; 
and the famous old-time placer camps of Stanislaus, 
Yuba, Calaveras and Oroville slumped into a pictur- 
esque and melancholy dilapidation. They belonged 
with a brave and splendid history. 

229 



The Greater America 



Around them for miles and miles was strewn the 
wreckage left by those early placer miners, a country 
dotted with heaps of stone and gravel, pitted with 
raw scars, a landscape ravaged and unsightly, yet 
dignified, in a certain measure, by the memories of 
the elemental manhood that had dared and labored 
with strong arms, and left its sons to build up this 
western empire. 

In those days flat-bottomed steamers scraped their 
way up the Sacramento, far above the city of that 
name, slid into the Feather River, and managed to 
go as far as Orovllle. This town, in the shadow 
of the Sierra Nevadas, when left stranded by the 
decay of placer mining, suffered yet another Invasion, 
before there came a generation of slumber, and then, 
in these days, a clamorous invasion by the fleet of 
gold dredgers. In the early sixties, the Chinese 
swarmed down to pan and rock for gold, until ten 
thousand of these alien Invaders were slaving in the 
fields and canons and creek bottoms around the town. 
The straight American breed was not only outnum- 
bered, it was almost submerged. But at length the 
plague of pig-tailed miners with the blue blouses 
passed on when they could no longer wash out enough 
" color " to satisfy their singularly modest demands, 
and the average on-looker would naturally have sup- 
posed that whatever gold the Chinese left behind 
was not worth the attention of any white man outside 
a padded cell. 

230 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

Oroville discovered that the only natural asset not 
torn to pieces by the hunt for gold was the climate, 
and began to plant orange and olive groves, and turn 
itself into as conservative and respectable a commu- 
nity as you could find on the map. The green groves 
spread among the pits and stone piles, and slowly the 
country took on a verdant and pleasing aspect, and 
the quiet industry of the fruit farmer was hiding the 
wounds left by the gold seeker. 

Less than ten years ago, however, an amazing 
thing happened to Oroville, beside which those earlier 
Invasions were of the kindergarten order. Employ- 
ing huge power dredging machines to extract gold 
from ground already worked over had been tried 
many years before In Montana. It failed there for 
lack of sufficient mechanical Ingenuity. Earlier even 
than that, half a century ago. Inventors were dream- 
ing and working at the problem, and the rusting skele- 
tons of their failures are scattered over California 
and New Zealand. There Is even report of a dredge 
that failed on the Feather River near Oroville while 
the argonauts were In their heyday. And It was at 
Oroville, In 1896, that the first successful operation 
on a large scale had Its beginning. 

Now, thirty of these monsters are making hash 
of the landscape within eight miles of the town, and 
more are building. 

Unless you have seen them at work, the gold 
dredger does not convey much that Is of striking and 

231 



The Greater America 



impressive interest. You couple it in your mind with 
the squalid and grimy harbor and river steam dredg- 
ers, which fail to inspire a thrill in the most morbidly 
imaginative observer. Compared with these, how- 
ever, the gold ship is as a thoroughbred to a cart 
horse, or a liner to a coal schooner. 

It does things which no machine built by man has 
any business doing. It is a huge vessel afloat, of the 
imposing height and bulk of a Mississippi River 
packet; a regiment of troops could be massed on its 
decks. Yet it is not built on the river, it is never 
launched, and you may find one working five miles 
from the nearest navigable stream, yes, even in the 
middle of an orange grove whose only pretense to 
water transportation is an irrigating ditch. 

This vessel, so big and towering that its upper 
works can be seen across miles of open country, is 
distinctly a nautical paradox to the verge of absurdity. 
When the capitalist behind one of these enterprises 
wishes to invest from $50,000 to $80,000 to add a 
new dredge to his fleet (for this is not a poor man's 
game), the construction force begins the operation 
by digging an immense hole in the ground, called the 
" pit," located in the middle of the area which is to 
be dredged for gold. In this excavation the hull of 
the vessel is built, resting on the bottom. Then her 
upper works are added, and her powerful electric 
machinery and dredging apparatus installed. 

So far the process is like that of building a factory, 
232 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

minus the cellar. When the vessel is ready to be 
*' launched," if you may call it such, a ditch is opened 
from the nearest water supply — a little ditch at that, 
not much bigger than the kind one jumps across in 
a country field. The water fills the pond, until the 
ungainly craft is floating, and she needs only three 
feet of water for her extraordinary purposes. 

A heavy copper cable, buoyed on floats, writhes 
from the bank to her interior. There is no boiler, 
no smokestack, no fireman, no engines to speak of. 
She is a craft of surprises at every turn. She haS bor- 
rowed the water to float herself. She takes the power 
to operate her machinery from mountain streams 
forty miles away in the Sierras. The electric current 
thus generated is not alone for the dredgers. It 
is carried two hundred miles farther, and turns the 
factory wheels of San Francisco, and even down to 
San Jose. And because man has solved the problem 
of transmitting the strength of thousands of horses 
from waterfalls, over hundreds of miles, man is 
almost eliminated from these gold dredgers. 

Over a great arm of timbers and steel, lowered to 
the bottom of the little pond, revolves an endless row 
of steel buckets. The edges of these buckets bite 
into the clay, the gravel and the sand, and this real 
estate is fed into a hopper which sends it along for 
treatment. 

As the dredger eats its way into the bank ahead. 
It hitches its bulk along and thus makes more room 

233 



The Greater America 



for itself. In time the muddy pit may stretch away 
into a canal, perhaps a half mile long, in which the 
dredger advances, chews up the landscape, turns 
and digs another canal parallel with its first track, 
as it seeks the earth worth its while to pick up and 
digest. 

The havoc wrought is fairly staggering. The 
earth is washed from the stones as the debris passes 
through the vessel, and these stones, in size from a 
pebble to a bowlder, are spewed out from the other 
end of the machine until they are piled into great 
windrows and hills thirty and forty feet high — gaunt, 
bald ranges of stone on which nothing can ever grow. 
No contrivance of man blasts a landscape more 
utterly. 

Thus devouring earth and spitting out rock, the 
dredger moves across the face of the land. She 
picks up two thousand cubic yards of earth every day, 
and the weight of it is five thousand tons, a cargo for 
a large ocean steamer. This five thousand tons is 
taken aboard, the gold extracted, and every bit of 
the earth and stone put overboard again, by a crew 
of — fifty men? No, only three men are required to 
operate this monster, three men and a " boss," three 
shifts a day, with helpers, a dozen men all told, to 
keep the gold ship working twenty-four hours a day, 
three hundred and sixty-four days a year, for Christ- 
mas is the only day on which the vessel is idle, except 
for repairs. 

234 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

Of these three men, one stands In what may be 
called the pilot house on the hurricane deck, and 
handles a set of levers and two electric controllers 
like those of the motorman of a trolley car. In this 
easy fashion he sends the great dredging arm bur- 
rowing deeper, or farther ashore, and moves the 
vessel to keep pace with the work. Timber anchor- 
ages, called " spuds," hold her in position fore and 
aft, and wire cables lead from shore to geared drums 
aboard, so that the craft pulls herself into a new 
position whenever needed. 

The second man looks after matters in the machin- 
ery between decks, and a third man hovers around as 
an extra hand, although he Is not needed In the actual 
operation of the ship. 

Here you see a rare triumph of labor-saving inge- 
nuity, yet the gold saving Is far more remarkable 
a feat. A cubic yard of earth, gravel and stones 
weighs nearly one and a half tons. The average 
value of the gold taken from this mass of earth in 
the Orovllle district Is seventeen cents. That Is to 
say, to extract one dollar's worth of gold, between 
eight and nine tons of real estate must be screened 
and washed. 

Now, one cubic yard, or ton and a half, of earth. 
Is a large mass, how large you may gain some notion 
by recalling what a ton of coal looks like. The 
seventeen cents' worth of gold in It is not all in one 
piece. Even if it were, It would bulk about one-sixth 



The Greater America 



of the size of one of those wee gold dollars that were 
withdrawn from circulation because when a man 
received one he was never quite sure whether he had 
it with him or not. 

This tiny amount of gold is scattered through the 
earth and stones in particles so fine that a breath will 
often blow them from the palm of your hand. Their 
average size is — well, they just miss being smaller 
than anything — not mustard seed, because they are 
flat and thin like tiny scales. 

Now, when you divide an amount of gold one- 
sixth the size of a gold dollar into a large number of 
fractions, and hide these almost infinitesimal bits in 
a cartload of earth, finding the proverbial needle in a 
haystack becomes child's play. On a somewhat larger 
scale, imagine sifting eight tons of coal over a screen 
until one gold dollar drops through in installments. 

When the avalanche of dripping earth and stones 
thunders through the hopper, it falls upon a series 
of steel screens frequently perforated with holes about 
the size of a lead pencil. Many jets of water, under 
pressure from a pump below, drive into the mass of 
debris, which is in violent agitation because the screens 
are shaking to and fro with much rapidity. The 
stones, smooth and rounded by glacial wear and tear, 
do a devil's dance, tons of them at once, while the 
earth and the smallest gravel are washed through 
the screens. 

Inasmuch as only a small part of the material is 
236 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

shaken through, the stone becomes refuse. It roars 
down across the screens, and tumbles on to an endless 
belt moving in a trough, and marches up, up a long 
arm at the stern of the vessel until it tumbles on the 
heap of waste material which grows into one of the 
young mountains of stone that are murdering the 
Oroville landscape. 

Once through the screens, the material saved is 
caught up in a flood of water that surges down over 
a row of sluices. These sluices or inclines are crossed 
by many bars of wood and metal, called " riffles," 
which are loaded with mercury as a bait to catch the 
coy flakes of gold. 

Gravity is the engineer In charge here, As by a 
miracle, these tiny particles settle In this seething 
torrent of water, and nestle against the " riffles," there 
to stay until the monthly " clean-up." This part of 
it Is the old placer-mining process expanded to meet 
these new conditions. 

Freed of Its gold, the water races down to flow into 
the pond through a " tail sluice," and is used over 
and over again by this highly economical craft. 

It Is an easy matter to reckon that by handling 
2,000 yards of earth a day one of these dredgers will 
hold on to $640 worth of gold every twenty-four 
hours. It is a lesson In the value of little things that 
would have delighted the author of " Poor Richard's 
Almanac." The owners of these plants work them 
to the limit of their capacity In order to extract the 

237 



The Greater America 



profits demanded. If a dredger stops working five 
minutes for repairs, the stop is logged by the fore- 
man, and if there are many of these pauses in the 
month, the superintendent is apt to ask for explana- 
tions. It is a breathless race for gold, seemingly as 
frenzied in its way as the headlong rush for a Klon- 
dike field. Machinery is not built that can stand such 
high-pressure strain without rest, and many and costly 
have been the breakdowns in these greedy craft. 

My first glimpse of this quest of gold by twentieth 
century methods was by night, with the general man- 
ager of one of the largest companies operating. I 
drove through a starlit evening to the Garden Ranch 
dredger, five miles out of Oroville, and five miles 
from the river. By the roadside were dusky rows of 
orange trees, the homes of farmer and fruit grower 
were half hidden in shade trees, and the smell of 
roses blooming out-of-doors In late October was in 
the air. 

The scenes were sweetly rural, with the semi- 
tropical charm of this sun-bathed California valley. 

After a while there gleamed through orderly rows 
of orange trees a blaze of electric illumination, as if a 
bit of Coney Island had been broken oft and tossed 
into this far corner. Drawing nearer, the incon- 
gruous dazzle outlined the broad-beamed bulk and 
extended arms of the dredger, a strange sight in the 
night for such a background. One hundred and fifty 
candle-power lights bedecked it, and the crew stood 

238 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

out black against this fierce illumination. Daylight 
could have been no brighter. 

The vessel floated in a pond just big enough to 
hold her. Ahead was the orange grove she was 
devouring. Astern of her the debris of stone was 
heaped higher than her decks. It was impossible to 
help asking, "How on earth did she get there?" 
" Oh, she was built and floated several hundred yards 
back of where she is now," was the explanation. " As 
she's worked forward, the waste has been thrown off 
behind her, so she's covered up her tracks. All the 
water we need is just what you see around her, this 
little mud-hole of a pond. An Irrigation ditch gives 
us all the water we need." 

Clamorous, untiring, eating land by night as well 
as day, the dredger tugged at her moorings, her deck 
heaving to the power of her exertions, until, out here 
in the mysterious night, it were not overfanclful to 
think of her as incarnate with the spirit of the age that 
can create such things as these. 

As we drove townward, the road lifted to a hill- 
top, beyond which the quiet country unfolded for a 
long distance. There were no lights in the houses by 
the road, and the town was not yet visible, but against 
the starry horizon gleamed a line of brilliant lights in 
clusters. They stretched away in a dimming belt for 
five miles. One was reminded of a procession of big 
excursion steamers passing up river after dark. These 
were the lights of the gold ships, a squadron taking 

239 



The Greater America 



new wealth from the soil, an up-to-date argosy under 
the American flag. 

Next day I visited several of these craft, scattered 
over thousands of acres of land, most of which was 
valuable for fruit growing until the gold fleet came. 
Now the dredge companies own about 5,500 acres 
in the Oroville district, and will buy about two thou- 
sand acres more that have been prospected. 

Calculating that this area will be worked to a 
depth of ten yards, it is estimated that these 7,500 
acres will yield a little more than sixty million dollars 
in gold. In the Folsom district of Sacramento 
County, where eight dredgers are now at work, the 
probable yield for the 5,000 acres controlled will be 
forty million dollars. 

There is another side to this glittering picture. 
These 7,500 acres around Oroville, in the orange 
belt, will be ruined for all purposes and for all time. 
They will be destroyed as effectively as if an earth- 
quake dropped them into the bowels of the earth. 
The Gould transcontinental line from Salt Lake is 
pushing its construction through the Oroville district. 
Competition for freight traffic with the Southern 
Pacific will lower rates for the fruit growers, and 
increase the productive value of their land. I have 
seen regions in this western country, far less favored 
by nature, in which irrigated land had reached a 
value of a thousand dollars an acre for fruit 
growing. It is therefore not impossible that the 

240 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

next generation of dwellers in the Oroville dis- 
trici may bitterly regret that their fathers sold their 
acres to the gold dredgers. 

But the gold seekers, as has been their habit always, 
think not of the morrow. They will devour until no 
more remains, and then move on to fresher fields, 
leaving wreckage in their wake. Hydraulic mining 
in California was at length killed by process of law, 
for the very reasons mentioned. But your gold miner, 
whether he toils at rocker or ground sluice or from 
his offices in New York and San Francisco urges his 
eighty-thousand-dollar dredger to strain for greater 
output, reckons not with the future. His view-point 
is somewhat akin to that of the lumberman of Wash- 
ington and Oregon who sweeps through the primeval 
forest like a whirlwind, and leaves a vast wreckage 
behind him. Wealth is in the present tense, and " the 
sooner the quicker," is the motto of such enterprising 
Americans as these. 

The gold dredgers may be right. Perhaps the 
gold is worth more than the land will ever be. This 
is for the future to solve. The observation of another 
stranger in Oroville when first he surveyed the trail 
of the gold ships Is not out of place or open to 
argument : 

" Now ain't they kicking up the unadulterated 
dickens of a muss ! " 

When you think that this bold quality of American 
Inventive talent has been able to devise machinery 

241 



The Greater America 



that makes it profitable to extract ten cents' worth 
of gold from a ton of earth, the enterprise becomes 
one of the romances of American industry; even 
if lives were not risked in the quest, capital gambled 
against huge hazards, and dashingly played for big 
stakes. Hundreds of thousands were thrown away 
in dredgers that failed. Even now, many problems 
are not out of the experimental woods. In New 
Zealand, for example, twenty dredgers were built 
fifteen years ago, at a cost of nearly $20,000 each, 
and proved failures. New talent made the attempt 
and succeeded, until now more than three hundred 
dredgers are digging for gold in New Zealand. 

Near Oroville, on a noble height, overlooking the 
Feather River, there is a home for ancient and dis- 
abled Odd Fellows. The Butte dredger Is not far 
away, and on the road to it you cross a mountain 
brook that winds amid many placer piles left by the 
" old-timers." One of these fine old Odd Fellows 
is a miner of the days of the argonauts, and he is not 
content to pass his latter days in idleness. So at the 
edge of the brook he has built him a rude shack of 
the type he learned to make in these valleys a half 
century ago. Under this shelter he has planted a 
gold rocker, and the simple kit of the California 
pioneer gold seeker. Here you can find him digging 
gravel from a near-by bank, lugging it up to his 
rocker by the brook and washing out a little gold for 
a prodigious amount of labor. With good luck, he 

242 




Tlie shack of the Forty-niner 




A monster that makes hash of the landscape 



Twentieth Century Argonauts 

may clean up fifty cents a day. He no longer has 
to earn his bread that way. He does it because he 
Hkes to. His shack is a picture such as you must 
travel far to find in the California of to-day. From 
his rocker, the old miner can hear the gold dredge 
grumbling and clanking as it chews up and spits out 
live thousand tons of " pay dirt " every twenty-four 
hours. Past and Present are neighbors here. 



243 



CHAPTER XVIII 

WHERE RANCH AND CITY MEET 

Nowhere can old and new American conditions be 
found, side by side, in more picturesquely impressive 
contrast than in that sunny corner of the Pacific Coast 
which is dominated by the spirit of Los Angeles. The 
city itself is a display of almost cyclonic enterprise, 
prosperity, and expansion, which have safely weath- 
ered the perilous enthusiasms of the " boomer " and 
the " booster." 

A foreign observer seeking the typical American 
spirit working at high pressure could do no better 
than to sit and " watch Los Angeles grow." This 
sounds a trifle like a real estate advertisement, but It 
Is meant only as a passing tribute to a city which has 
outstripped every other American city through the 
last decade, in the rate of Its Increase in building 
operations, property values, and population. 

Our observer would not have to dig out the facts 
and figures. They would be hurled at him by every 
other son of this magical city, and with an air of pride 
which makes your thorough-going western man dis- 
tinctive. He boils over with loyalty and belief In the 
ultimate destiny of his particular town from his boot- 
heels up, and whether It be Spokane or Portland or 

244 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



Los Angeles, he feels that his individual fortune is 
vitally bound up in the future of his community. 

Can you imagine a committee of citizens of an 
eastern town setting in operation a plan whereby all 
the boys and girls in the public schools pledge them- 
selves that whenever they write a letter to friends or 
relatives " back East," they will include mention of 
the charms of climate and the allurements of material 
prosperity to be found in their community and State? 
This was one item in a recent " Boosters' Club " 
campaign In Spokane, and it is mentioned here to 
illustrate the spirit which is common to these coast 
cities. 

Los Angeles is unique because it has become a city 
of two hundred thousand souls with a cheerful dis- 
regard of the laws of growth which are presumed to 
have a hand in upbuilding important commercial and 
distributing centers. Its back country is still unde- 
veloped. Its shipping is in its infancy, and its manu- 
factures are as yet a minor factor. These things have 
made it the prodigy among American cities — climate, 
trolley lines, advertising. At first glimpse, this does 
not look like a stable foundation, yet Los Angeles 
continues to grow and to turn the laugh on the 
prophets who have wailed that such expansion was 
top-heavy by the very nature of things. 

Now this city of massive hotels and business blocks 
and beautiful homes, with an interurban electric rail- 
way system which makes eastern enterprise seem crude 

245 



The Greater America 



and primitive, has risen from a half -Mexican pueblo 
of ten thousand people in less than a generation. Fig- 
ures are bald and unromantic, but let us deal with a 
few and have done with them. Los Angeles has more 
automobiles and telephones per head than any other 
American city; it led them all in increase of postal 
receipts last year; its assessed values are nearing the 
two-hundred-million-dollar mark, and it has begun 
work on a water-supply system which will cost twenty- 
one million dollars, and which will convey the moun- 
tain streams of the Sierras a distance of more than 
two hundred miles. 

So much by way of showing that the era of frenzied 
speculation is past, and with it the days of the real 
estate auction circuses with brass bands and side 
shows, which ran amuck some twenty years ago. It 
is true that to-day the real estate market strikes a 
conservative Easterner as fairly acrobatic. You can- 
not heave a brick anywhere within twenty miles of 
the city that will not alight on an attractive specula- 
tion in town lots. The electric roads, four hundred 
miles of them radiating from Los Angeles and five 
hundred miles more building along this corner of the 
coast, are bringing the whole countryside within 
touch of the city, and as a direct result there are such 
rapid increases in values as make one's head swim 
until he becomes acclimated. On these roads, which 
are built and ballasted like steam lines, trains of elec- 
tric cars whizz and whirr at speeds of thirty and forty 

246 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



miles an hour, thereby sweeping all the land within 
fifteen miles of Los Angeles, for example, into the 
market for suburban property. 

This tide of excessively up-to-date American expan- 
sion has swept before it the old life and atmosphere 
of the surviving Spanish and Mexican settlements. 
The prosaic Saxon first curtailed the beautiful name 
of his town, Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles (Town 
of the Queen of the Angels) , and later obliterated the 
native himself. There is a straggling Mexican quar- 
ter of the modern Los Angeles, and in the outskirts 
you may find the 'dobe house and the mud hovel 
thatched with straw where dwell the descendants of 
the race which won this wondrous territory for the 
red and yellow banner of Castile. These are no more 
than melancholy and unimportant relics of a vastly 
romantic and picturesque era which has passed away 
within the memory of living men. 

There still survives an opportunity, however, to 
find, in its last days, a magnificent survival of the life 
and background and conditions which immediately 
preceded the amazing modernity of Los Angeles and 
of the lamented San Francisco. One of the last of 
the ancient and lordly estates of Southern California 
lies at the very edge of Los Angeles, the Santa Anita 
ranch of " Lucky " Baldwin. Its doom is so immi- 
nent that the process of destruction has even begun. 
The electric road has gashed a path through its 
groves and orchards, and the real estate speculator is 

247 



The Greater America 



nibbling at its outskirts. Within five years it is likely 
that this ranch will be dotted with the red-roofed cot- 
tages of the eastern pilgrim, and checkered with 
" boulevards " and " avenues." 

It is still a feudal community unto itself, this 
princely realm of sixty thousand acres. But it must 
go, because these sixty thousand acres are worth ten 
million dollars as city and suburban " real estate," a 
very pretty rise in values since " Lucky " Baldwin 
picked up these Spanish grants for a song as farming 
land some forty years ago. For more than a century 
these lands have been cultivated in a glorious sweep 
of vineyards, and orange and olive orchards, rich 
sheep and cattle pastures, and horse ranches, their 
life and customs handed down from the Spanish 
owners of the various ranchos which were swept into 
one estate by the pioneer " Lucky " Baldwin. 

The very names of the tracts which were grouped 
under the name of Santa Anita ranch sound mellow 
and reminiscent to the ear: La Puenta, Portrero de 
Felipe Logo, Portrero Grande, La Merced, San Fran- 
cisquito. Da Cienega, and Portrero Chico, all in the 
heart of the beautiful San Gabriel Valley. 

With these ranches came one of the oldest vine- 
yards and wineries of Southern California, founded 
by the Spanish padres from the San Gabriel Mission. 
And the low, white-walled adobe home In which the 
aged " Lucky " Baldwin lives to-day was built as a 
fort and outpost by these same Spanish friars when 

248 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



these lands were being wrested from the wilderness. 
The links which lead from the modern Los Angeles 
back to the Spanish era are therefore unbroken. 

The Santa Anita ranch, through which darts the 
electric car filled with tourists from the East, was 
tenanted when the tall galleons were bringing from 
Spain the priests and soldiers to govern this new land 
of theirs; when the little pueblo of Los Angeles was 
gay with caballeros who bade farewell to black-eyed 
girls before they set out for the unknown North; 
when, at length, the Santa Fe trail crept overland to 
reach the Pacific shore and brought the vanguard of 
the hardy American invasion which was to sweep over 
the Spanish-speaking race like a landslide. 

The tourist and home seeker, the real estate agent 
and the manufacturer, the trolley and the electric 
light denote the march of civilization, but something 
most attractive and in a way very precious will vanish 
when Los Angeles absorbs into its feverish activity 
this fine old Santa Anita ranch. 

Even in these, its last days, it seems to stand remote 
and aloof with a certain strength of dignity and inde- 
pendence. It does not belong with that complex and 
interwoven civilization in which a man must depend 
upon other men to produce all that he eats and wears 
and uses. It is opposed to all that makes the life and 
commerce of a city. 

Such an estate, if put to it, could to-day maintain 
its population of perhaps a thousand men, women 

249 



The Greater America 



and children without commerce with the world be- 
yond. Cut the railroads, and Los Angeles must face 
starvation within three or four days. It consumes 
and devours with titanic appetite, but it does not 
produce. 

Out at Santa Anita, however. Its busy community 
could be clothed and fed in comfort and even luxury, 
without help from a railroad. Even during " Lucky " 
Baldwin's proprietorship, the twelve-mule freight 
teams, with jingling bells on the collars, trailed to 
and from Los Angeles, as the only link of communi- 
cation with the outside world, and the people of the 
estate were as comfortable and possibly as happy as 
they are to-day. 

The lord of this ranch can drive eighteen miles In 
a straight line across his own acres. In such a tour 
he will pass his own general merchandise store, main- 
tained for the convenience of his own people, the 
school supported for their children, the blacksmith 
shop, the church and the post office, all belonging to 
the equipment of the estate. He will pass through 
his vast orange and fig and olive orchards, his walnut 
groves and his vineyards where the Mission grape Is 
gathered from the gnarled vines planted by the 
padres. There are also one hundred acres of lemons, 
one hundred acres of grape fruit, two thousand acres 
of vegetables, and twenty thousand acres of corn, hay 
and small grains. His thirty thousand sheep graze 
on the brown hillsides, and he could clothe his people 

250 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



with their wool, if he wished. His wheat ranch 
could feed them, his three thousand head of cattle 
could provide beef and leather. In other fields are 
five hundred work mules and five hundred draught 
and carriage horses. 

These sixty thousand acres are divided into several 
ranches, each in charge of a superintendent, who in 
turn reports to a general manager, who is responsible 
to the owner. It is a paternal, feudal system, highly 
specialized by means of the American talent for sys- 
tematic administration and organization. 

Toiling in the flooding sunshine of these smiling 
fields and slopes are Japanese and Mexicans and 
negroes and Chinese and Americans, almost a thou- 
sand of them, scattered over many miles of country. 
Tucked away in the corners of little valleys, under 
the spreading oaks, you will find the villages of this 
motley population. In the Mexican colony of 
thatched and flimsy huts, little brown children run 
about with no more clothing than would dust a gun- 
barrel. In sheep-shearing time the population Is 
enlivened by the coming of the band of half-breeds 
and Indians and " Greasers," who make festival with 
the residents when the work is done. When one 
wanders about the odd corners of the ranch, watching 
the quiet and ancient habit of tilling and garnering 
the abundant fruits of the earth and the pasture, the 
twentieth century bustle of Los Angeles becomes a 
thing remote and incongruous. 

251 



The Greater America 



While this estate mirrors so largely the life of the 
Spanish grants of the early settlement of the Pacific 
Coast, its latest owner in himself supplies a chap- 
ter which covers the last half century almost, from 
the time when Fremont, the Pathfinder, unfurled the 
Stars and Stripes in Los Angeles in 1846. While the 
stout adobe walls of the home on Santa Anita ranch 
preserve the legends of a century and more ago, the 
aged man who dwells therein is a relic and a reminder 
of an era even more vivid and picturesque. " Lucky " 
Baldwin belongs with the flamboyant days of the 
Forty-niners, with the age when life on the Pacific 
Coast was a melodrama of great fortunes won and 
flung away with lavish hand and high heart, the era 
of the argonauts, the builders, and the gamblers with 
life and gold. 

In 1853, or more than a half century ago, a little 
party of gold seekers, with a meager outfit of horses 
and wagons, started for California from the village 
of Racine, Wisconsin. In command of this adven- 
turous expedition was a young man who took with 
him his wife and infant daughter. His name was 
E. J. Baldwin, and he made a wise choice in shaking 
from his restless feet the dust of a tamer civilization. 
He needed a larger theater of action for his pent-up 
and surging activities. While trailing through the 
mountains of Utah the pioneers were attacked by 
Indians, who were beaten off during a six-hour fight 
in which young Baldwin killed their chief. After 

252 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



six months of hardship the party reached Hangtown 
(later called Placerville) , in California. 

Here Baldwin tarried and began placer mining. 
He appears to have been no more than an ordinary 
red-shirted argonaut, meeting the ups and downs of 
mining luck, until the discovery of the Comstock Lode 
at Virginia City. Thither he drifted, and discovered 
that his natural bent was gambhng with the mines 
that other men had opened. Amid a whirlwind of 
speculation he fought his way with such success that 
he loomed from the smoke In a few months as 
" Lucky " Baldwin, the man who had cleaned up 
seven and a half million dollars in the gigantic deals 
In the stock of the Ophir mines. 

San Francisco was the Mecca of those lucky sons 
of fortune who were rearing a great city by the 
Golden Gate. As a stock and mining speculator, 
" Lucky " Baldwin shone resplendent, but he was 
also a loyal son of San Francisco. He built hotels 
and theaters and business blocks, even while he was 
amazing that far from conservative community by 
madly freakish extravagances. 

In a very lucid interval he bought all the Spanish 
grants he could find near Los Angeles, and there spent 
a million In making this ranch of his not only a splen- 
didly productive property, but also one of the most 
beautiful estates ever laid out In this or any other 
country. It was his hobby, his pet, and he planted 
miles of avenues with noble shade trees, and made 

253 



The Greater America 



wonderful tropical gardens, so that to-day his home 
is surrounded by a paradise of vernal beauty. 

" Lucky " Baldwin became interested in the turf 
while he was in the heyday of his wealth, health and 
headlong vigor. He made Santa Anita ranch famous 
as a home of winning thoroughbreds, and his racing 
colors flashed on every noted track. The racing sta- 
ble is still a part of the ranch, and in the lush pastures 
wander costly bands of colts and brood mares, while 
in the stables are such sires and famous winners of 
historic events as Emperor of Norfolk, and Rey del 
Santa Anita, and Cruzadas. The mighty sire Grim- 
sted, who produced more stake winners than any other 
horse in America, is buried in a park-like enclosure, 
over the gateway of which is an arch inscribed with 
the words, " The Home of Grimsted." The grave 
and park are tended with scrupulous care, and betoken 
a strain of sentiment in this rough-and-tumble hero of 
a hundred bizarre adventures and hazards, " Lucky " 
Baldwin. 

More than once it has been reported that this West- 
erner's fortune has been swept away in speculation, 
or plunging on the turf, or in extravagant whimsicali- 
ties, yet through it all he has clung to his beloved 
Santa Anita. The ranch was heavily mortgaged to 
help him weather one heavy storm, yet the value of 
this land has risen with such amazing swiftness, be- 
cause of its nearness to Los Angeles, that in the end 
he has a splendid fortune in the estate, which can 

254 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



be sold for more than fifteen hundred dollars an acre, 
as fast as he is willing to let it be chopped up by the 
city broker. 

In his old age " Lucky " Baldwin retired to his 
ranch, there to spend the little time of his life that 
might be left for him. When I met him there last 
year, he was still alert in mind and vigorous of frame, 
a wiry, sharp-visaged little man past his eightieth 
year, who had endured enough of reckless living and 
bruising shocks of fortune to kill ordinary men in 
their prime. Three mornings each week he arose at 
daylight and drove to his racing stables to see his 
string of thoroughbreds in their morning gallops 
around a half-mile track. They were being prepared 
for their campaign on far-away tracks, but he would 
nevermore see them break and wheel in the start, and 
thunder past the finish post. His sight was fast fail- 
ing, but he knew and loved his horses, as they filed 
by him, one by one. 

Thus, after as stormy and colorful a career as befell 
any of those bold jugglers with titanic fortunes in the 
days of gold, he found a placid refuge on this noble 
ranch, the creation of which had been the work of his 
youth. With all his faults, and they have been many 
and notorious, he was one of the builders of that 
empire of the Pacific; and when San Francisco was 
overwhelmed by earthquake and fire, the destruction 
included no small share of " Lucky " Baldwin's crea- 
tive effort in the upbuilding of that noble city. 

255 



The Greater America 



This ranch of his is a monument also to his con- 
structive genius. Its successful operation has been a 
task demanding unusual talent and ability, and these 
qualities of his have preserved it intact with its 
imposing array of belated industries and activities 
in an age in whose social economy it can find no place. 
Just as he is a relic of another age in the expansion of 
this nation, so his ranch harks farther back into a 
more remote era and affords a vanishing glimpse of 
the life which was before the Stars and Stripes were 
flown over this vast territory to the west of the Rock- 
ies, and south of the area first explored and claimed 
by the Hudson's Bay Company's pioneers who in- 
vaded the Pacific Slope from the north. 

Not far from Santa Anita ranch is the old Mission 
of San Gabriel, whose life was co-existent with that 
of these Spanish grants and ranches. The gray bell 
tower, the massive adobe walls, and the quiet gardens 
where once walked the black-robed padres, and where 
their Indian converts toiled, have been preserved to 
lend a little touch of old-world atmosphere to the 
landscape of to-day. They will be kept as memorials, 
but the broad fields and orchards, the pastures and 
the groves of Santa Anita are being submerged in the 
roaring tide of American progress in material wealth 
and faith in the future. 

" Lucky " Baldwin sat on the wide porch of his 
adobe mansion, whose walls were a Spanish fort a 
hundred and fifty years ago. On every side stretched 

256 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



the smiling fertility of his principality, watered by 
gushing streams from artesian wells, a water system 
as extensive as that of many cities. In the background 
marched the brown ramparts of the Sierra Madre 
Mountains, and even on those heights one could dis- 
cern a ribbon-like trail cut for the sight-seeing tourist. 
The old man Indulged in no poetic reverie over the 
passing of the old order of things. His mind dwelt 
on what he had done toward making the building of 
California and San Francisco. Thus In his last days 
this battered survivor of the blazing days of gilded 
toll and folly by the Golden Gate wished to be 
remembered for what he had done for the land he 
loved, and In this he showed the spirit of your true 
Callfornian. 

" If you will look In Bancroft's ' Chronicles of the 
Builders,' " he said, " you will find all you want to 
know about me. Don't take any stock in all the 
stories you hear about my foolishness in slinging for- 
tunes around. There's a set of harness out there in 
the stable that cost me eight thousand dollars, and 
I've had a run for my money, but I helped make San 
Francisco a stronger, bigger city, and that counts for 
something. And I've made a beautiful spot of this 
ranch, and I've held It together, and I don't expect 
to live to see it cut up entirely. It's my home, and 
it means a big sight more to me because I made 
It, sixty thousand acres, and every acre working for 
me." 

257 



The Greater America 



His mood veered and his faded eye twinkled as he 
observed : 

" Jim Jeffries was down to see me the other day, 
and he told me he made twenty thousand dollars in a 
^ght. I told him that I won five million dollars in 
one fight when I was in my prime, and that I guessed 
it paid better than pugilism while it lasted." 

" Lucky " Baldwin, a type of the days of the young 
and riotous California, is too old to meet and conquer 
the new conditions which have shoved his ranch and 
himself far into the background of progress. As Los 
Angeles pictures the expanding Americanism of this 
century, so H. E. Huntington, the man who has led 
in its promotion, is a type of the American builder of 
to-day; and as he has driven his electric roads through 
the heart of Santa Anita ranch, so he is everywhere in 
his part of the country infusing old conditions with 
the new spirit of progress. 

There has been nothing of the bizarre or spectacu- 
lar about his programme of expansion. A trained 
railway man, schooled by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, 
he has swung his energy away from the steam road to 
become the foremost promoter of the electric trolley 
as a means of developing and exploiting natural re- 
sources. He has made all the towns of Southern 
California near neighbors of Los Angeles, and this 
task has been accomplished in less than ten years. 
First came the purchase of existing lines, then consoli- 
dation and reorganization, and after that rebuilding 

258 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



and new construction, until within the city hmits of 
Los Angeles alone there are two hundred miles of 
trolley tracks. Now you can whirl out into the coun- 
try over standard-gauge, double-track lines operated 
by automatic signal systems, at express speed. 

The real estate " boom " of Los Angeles cannot be 
fairly weighed without a knowledge of this wonder- 
ful transportation development. H. E. Huntington 
has made fortunes for others, while at the same time 
he has reaped great wealth for himself. He had 
bought up great tracts of unimproved land within 
a few miles of Los Angeles, and then put an electric 
road through the tree property thus acquired. Of 
course the coming of the railroad has increased the 
realty values by hundreds per cent, and Mr. Hunting- 
ton, having bought on a certainty, has not suffered by 
this method of operation. 

At the same time it should be remembered, even 
though it be the fashion to sling bricks at the railway 
magnate on general principles as an oppressor and a 
robber, that for every million H. E. Huntington has 
reaped from his transactions, the community has ben- 
efited tenfold in increased property valuations and 
ease of communication. 

It is a magical sort of an operation, this develop- 
ment of the Los Angeles country. A small rancher 
is struggling to make both ends meet, away off in 
what appears to be an isolated corner of the landscape. 
He lives perhaps several miles from his nearest 

259 



The Greater America 



neighbor, and it is an all-day haul to get to the nearest 
market. Along come the surveyors, and then the 
construction gangs, and presto ! the electric road has 
linked this ranch with Los Angeles by no more than 
half or three-quarters of an hour in time. The little 
poverty-stricken ranch has become suburban property 
overnight, and our son of the soil is in affluence and 
thinks " The Arabian Nights " tame reading. The 
chances are even that he blossoms out as a real estate 
agent and invades Los Angeles with a bundle of blue- 
print maps under his arm. 

As a result of this prodigious railway develop- 
ment, the fifty thousand visitors who frequent Los 
Angeles most of the time no sooner land in the city 
than they plan to get out of it. The hotels are built 
like business blocks, essentially metropolitan of aspect. 
This disappoints the stranger who expects to find palm 
trees and gardens under his hotel window. He soon 
discovers, however, that the hotel is for eating and 
sleeping, nothing more. He streams with the multi- 
tude into the big street cars, and flies into the country 
in almost any direction, to seashore, mountain, trop- 
ical city and resort, covering a hundred miles of 
landscape in a day, while the Pacific breezes blow 
through him, and he speeds over a dustless roadbed. 
He can visit one or more of fifty attractive places 
every day and return to the city for dinner. 

When time hangs heavy on his hands he can find 
abundant entertainment in trying to figure out the 

260 



Where Ranch and City Meet 



why and wherefore of Los Angeles, and he must come 
back In the final issue to the three factors of climate, 
trolleys and advertising. As cosmopolitan a city as 
there is in America, made up of pilgrims from every 
State of East and West, these two hundred thousand 
men, women and children are fused in the smelting 
pot of local pride and enthusiasm until they are sure 
in their hearts that there is no place on God's green 
footstool worthy to be compared with Los Angeles, 
and that even though its present prosperity is fairly 
staggering, its future holds possibilities even more 
awe-inspiring. It is, in a way, like an air plant, tak- 
ing its sustenance from the climate and not from the 
soil, and there is no danger of bankrupting this chief 
asset. 

The commercial bodies of this lusty young metropo- 
lis have spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars 
within ten years in directly advertising its attractions. 
They have reaped big dividends and to-day their city 
is the best-known pleasure and health resort in the 
world, San Francisco had a large share of this com- 
mon western spirit, and neither fire nor earthquake 
can cripple it. The city which will rise on the ruins 
of the old San Francisco will be more like Los 
Angeles, essentially modern in every way, and proud 
of its modernity. The storied days of the Forty- 
niners have been obliterated in San Francisco, the 
memories of the argonauts have been destroyed, but 
their spirit lives and shines. 

261 



The Greater America 



Los Angeles is sweeping away the last traces of the 
old era, and faces the future, not the past. We may 
sigh for the passing of Santa Anita ranch, but where 
thirty thousand sheep and cattle graze, as many 
Americans will be dwelling in their own homes within 
the life of this generation. 



262 




A Mexican sheep herder and his flock 




■^ 
« 



'J>yj^ 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE GOLD CAMPS OF THE DESERT 

" // it looks good to you, get to it." 

This Is a western slogan in which faith and works 
are so closely packed that another word would spoil 
it. There is lacking the literary adornment of those 
" creeds " and " symphonies " which, done in a very 
pretty type or stamped on a ragged bit of leather, 
exhort us to plain living and high thinking with due 
regard for the birds and flowers. No, there is none 
of the tinkling " preachment " doctrine of conduct 
in this big, rugged call to action, " If it looks good 
to you, get to it." It is not preached, but lived by 
men who are too busy to prate much about the " sim- 
ple life," and it says nothing about obstacles in the 
way. It would be hard to focus with more brevity 
and force the virile spirit of the Americans who have 
made and bulwarked their nation. I soon discovered 
that this was the war cry whose inspiration has peo- 
pled the desert of Nevada within the last five years. 

" It looked good " to many thousand men who 
wanted to seek gold, and they " went to it," and 
made cities in the most desolate and forbidding corner 
of the United States. 

It is probable that this country will not see another 
263 



The Greater America 



great " gold stampede," wherefore this corner of the 
West was the next goal of my pilgrimage after swing- 
ing up from among the lush vineyards and smiling 
orchards of Southern California. Before these latest 
discoveries were made in Nevada, it was generally 
believed that the frenzied rush of armies of treasure 
seekers must be classed as a vanished part of the 
frontier life and conditions. Old prospectors, how- 
ever, with the clamor of Cripple Creek still echoing 
in their memories, would wag their gray beards with 
a knowing air and trudge into the desert and among 
the mountains, confident that other bonanzas were 
waiting to be revealed. 

Instead of seeking new sources of supply the men 
with more capital than imagination were devising new 
methods to work over old diggings. Their mighty 
electric dredges were turning over the placer gravel 
washed out by the Forty-niners, and by a miracle of 
economy making it profitable to extract eleven cents' 
worth of gold from a ton of earth. Or their stamp 
mills and scientific processes were pounding up and 
milling the low-grade ore of Alaska and the moun- 
tains of the West. The gold hunter and producer 
were being rapidly stripped of their ancient red- 
blooded romance of adventure by the prosaic methods 
of twentieth century enterprise, which have conspired 
to banish the cowboy and the sailor. 

Nevada was a butt for jests among her sister States, 
which delighted to record such items as : 

264 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

" Three hoboes were thrown off a train while 
crossing the Nevada desert the other day. Their 
arrival doubled the population of the county in which 
they hit the alkali, and a real estate boom was started 
on the strength of it." 

The State of bare, brown mountains and sand and 
sagebrush was beginning to feel the stir of the irri- 
gation movement, but the heyday of her mining glory 
seemed to slumber with a dead past. Silver camps 
that were hilarious cities of thousands of men and 
millions in wealth thirty years ago had dwindled to 
ruined hamlets whose brick blocks stood tenantless 
and forlorn. The queen of them all, Virginia City, 
was no more than a ghost of what she had been in 
the days of the Comstock lode. 

Those were the times when the poor miner John 
Mackay went to Nevada with only his pick and his 
stout arms; when Fair, the blue-eyed Scotchman, 
walked into Virginia without a dollar, and " hung 
up " his board with the widow Rooney up the gulch, 
until he should make his strike; when two young 
Irishmen, Flood and O'Brien, were digging in the 
hills with their comrade, George Hearst, all of them 
red-shirted prospectors together, with no other capi- 
tal than stout hearts and stouter backs. 

Their fortunes have built railroads, laid cables 
under seas and flung their children into the spangled 
world of fashion. The Comstock yielded more than 
two hundred millions of silver in sixteen years. Its 

265 



The Greater America 



mines were the lifeblood of the Pacific Coast. But 
when their glory departed, Nevada went to sleep 
again. Like the State In which he made the first dis- 
covery of the lode that bears his name, H. T. P. Com- 
stock could not cling to the riches he had laid bare for 
others. After wandering In poverty for years, he blew 
out his brains near Bozeman City, Montana, in 1870. 

The times have changed since then, and men have 
changed with them. The new mining camps of 
Nevada are alive with the old spirit that laughs at 
hardship and danger, and their builders have earned 
a place in the latter pages of the story of the American 
frontier. The professional " bad man " is a missing 
figure, and the contrast between these present-day 
camps of Tonopah, Goldfield and Bullfrog, and their 
predecessors of the Comstock, is wide and Impressive. 
Such colorful gentlemen as stalked through Virginia 
City thirty years ago may be glimpsed In these bits 
of life and manners as told by one of them: 

" A gambler of Herculean frame, with a huge 
black beard that gave him a most ferocious appear- 
ance, cheated a miner out of four or five hundred 
dollars in a poker game. The miner saw that he 
had been swindled after his money was gone, and 
demanded his cash. The big gambler laughed in his 
face. The miner, who was a small and inoffensive- 
looking person, left the place without more words. 
Some of the crowd in the saloon told the big sport 
that his man had gone off to heel himself, and that 

266 



TJie Gold Camps of the Desert 

there would be trouble later on. The big man was 
not alarmed — he was not going to be frightened 
away. He sat on a chair in the back room, near an 
open window, his head thrown back and his legs 
cocked up. He didn't care how many weapons the 
miner might bring. 

" ' Why, gentlemen,' he roared, ' you don't know 
me — you don't know who I am. I'm the Wild Boar 
of Temaha. The click of a six-shooter is music to 
my ear, and a bowie knife is my looking-glass.' 
(Here he happened to look toward the door, and saw 
the miner coming in with a sawed-off shotgun.) 
' But a shotgun lets me out,' and he went through 
the window head first." 

While I was going into Tonopah from Reno a 
mining engineer recalled his earlier experiences in the 
sizzling towns of the frontier. 

"I was a boy in Tombstone in 1881," said he, 
" and saw ' Doc ' Holliday and Wyatt and Virgil 
Earp wipe out the McClowrie and Clanton outfit. 
One of the Earps was a deputy United States marshal, 
another was the town marshal, and a third, Morgan 
Earp, was a Wells Fargo ' shotgun man ' or express 
messenger. There was a bad feeling between the 
Earps and the gang of cowboys led by Curly Bill, 
who were accused of holding up the stage and killing 
the driver. The two McClowries and the two Clan- 
tons accused the Earps of having a hand in the hold- 
up. The climax came when the Earps sent out word 

267 



The Greater America 



that the cow-men must not ride into Tombstone and 
shoot up the town any more. I was hiding behind 
an adobe house down at the corral when the Mc- 
Clowries and Clantons rode in to accept the chal- 
lenge. It was a fight to the finish. Two of the 
Earp crowd were wounded, but all of the other side 
were killed or mortally hurt right there at the corral. 

" A little later Morgan Earp was killed in a saloon 
by a load of buckshot fired through the window near 
which he was playing billiards." 

Now, the two surviving Earps, perhaps hoping 
that the frontier had come back to them, drifted into 
the new Goldfield district within the last year or so. 
Virgil Earp died in the Miners' Hospital at Goldfield, 
with his boots off, last autumn, after a most prosaic 
illness. Wyatt ran a little saloon in Tonopah for a 
while, and moved on. Once he flourished his guns 
while drunk, and they were rudely taken away from 
him by an undersized sheriff. 

This was in a mining camp of five thousand souls 
in which it had not yet been found necessary to 
organize a town government. Such is the law and 
order that reigns on the frontier of to-day. The 
story of the discovery of the first of this chain of 
desert gold camps appealed to me as worth more than 
passing mention, because of the rugged honesty of the 
leading actor in this gigantic melodrama. 

Six years ago a desert rancher named " Jim " 
Butler was prospecting in southern Nevada, packing 

268 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

his outfit along on the backs of six burros, trudging 
among the mountains a hundred and fifty miles from 
a railroad, in a country which an experienced miner 
would have laughed at. It had none of the signs of 
gold-bearing rock, and in his " plumb ignorance " 
Butler plodded along " forty miles from water and 

one mile from ," trusting to gold seeker's luck, 

and not at all confident of making a strike big enough 
to keep him in tobacco money. 

One night he camped at Tonopah Spring and found 
some rock that " looked good to him." He broke 
off a few chunks, loaded them on a burro and ram- 
bled home with them in the course of time. In the 
town of Belmont, near his ranch, his rock was greeted 
with light-hearted incredulity, and he was about to 
throw it away when a young lawyer named Oddie 
pricked up his ears, and with the rashness of youth 
offered to have the samples assayed. Butler went 
back to his ranch in Monitor Valley, and betook 
himself to the more important business of harvesting 
his hay crop. He had forgotten about his rock when 
Oddie sent him word that the stuff assayed several 
hundred dollars a ton in gold and silver. 

Even then the doubting rancher did not think it 
worth while to make a trip after more rock, but his 
very capable wife kept at him until he hitched up a 
team and drove into Belmont. Oddie had business 
of his .own by this time and could not go with them, 
so Butler and his wife made the lonely journey back 

269 



The Greater America 



to the Tonopah Spring region to look after his " false 
alarm." 

This was more than three months after his discov- 
ery, which indicates that Jim Butler was none of 
your get-rich-quick financiers. 

He staked out a claim for his wife, one for Oddie, 
and a third for himself. Three months more passed 
before Butler and Oddie loaded two wagons with 
grub and tools for doing development work on their 
claims. Oddie hauled water from the spring four 
miles away, cooked and looked after the horses, sharp- 
ened tools and helped Butler sink a shaft. In this 
back-breaking fashion they got out a ton of ore and 
hauled it fifty miles to Belmont, from which It was 
freighted across the desert a hundred miles farther 
to the nearest railroad at Austin, to be shipped to a 
smelter. This ton netted six hundred dollars in gold, 
and the two men, whose cash capital was twenty-five 
dollars, were able to hire a few men to help them. 

By winter the news sifted to the outside world that 
a rich strike had been made in that far-away corner 
of the Nevada desert, and men began to " get to it " 
from Carson and Reno, and the small camps In the 
mountains. Jim Butler decided to lease claims to 
the newcomers, and staked out locations for them 
as fast as they arrived. Another year and the human 
trickle had swelled to a flood, and capitalists were 
scenting the treasure and sending In their scouts. A 
year from the time he had swung the first pick on his 

270 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

locations, Butler sold the original claims for $336,- 
000, and shrewdly took part of his interest in stock 
of the company that was formed. 

The rise of these shares has since brought the pur- 
chase price of the claims to a value of more than a 
million dollars. 

Meanwhile this Jim Butler had been making addi- 
tional locations which included part of the future 
town site as well as other rich ledges in the moun- 
tains. He showed himself to be very much of a man, 
which is a good deal better than being very much of 
a millionaire. He leased out hundreds of claims in 
the height of the rush when the gold fever was 
addling the brains of men, as it has always done. 
But it never threw Jim Butler off his balance. He 
refused to have written deeds and contracts with 
his customers. Transactions whose total ran into the 
millions were bound only by the spoken word of 
Jim Butler. Nor could a fabulous strike on one 
of his leases ever tempt him to go back on his word. 
The town lots he sold when values were going sky- 
ward every few minutes were transferred with no 
paper to show for it. Broken grub-stake contracts, 
claim-jumping suits, and real estate disputes raged 
all around him, but nobody who did business with 
Jim Butler got into a lawsuit. That capable wife of 
his helped him keep track of his transactions, and an 
old account book held them all. 

Within two years Tonopah was a town of four 
271 



The Greater America 



thousand people, mostly men. It had been lighted 
with electricity, and a water system put in. There 
were two churches, a graded school with a hundred 
pupils, a club, two newspapers; and a railroad had 
crawled over the desert, built by the Tonopah Mining 
Company with $600,000 of its profits from its gold 
diggings. Tonopah took on a settled and civilized 
air, with its stone business and bank blocks rising in 
the midst of the shacks and tents that swarmed on 
its disheveled outskirts. Mining corporations, with 
millions of eastern capital behind them, were in pos- 
session of the richest claims, the country round had 
been prospected by thousands of invaders, and so the 
vanguard moved on south into the wilderness. At 
that time, if your water supply held out and you did 
not get lost or die of thirst along the edge of Death 
Valley, you could travel two hundred miles and find 
no town, no human settlement, except a shack or two 
beside the springs that were from thirty to fifty miles 
apart. Nothing alive flourished in the country except 
rattlesnakes and tarantulas; nothing grew there 
except sagebrush, cactus and mesquite. It was in 
the very heart of what is left of the " Great Ameri- 
can Desert." Water, food, fuel — everything had to 
be hauled through the mountain passes and sand from 
the nearest railroad. The heat in summer was fright- 
ful, rising to a hundred and twenty degrees in the 
shade, where there was any shade, and lingering over 
a hundred degrees at midnight in midsummer. 

272 




E^ 



^ 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

While In Alaska the gold hunters' stories are of 
snow and Ice and bitter cold, of dog sleds and snow- 
shoes and furs, this rush Into the desert was framed 
In clouds of white and choking dust, amid the peril 
of heat and thirst. 

Thousands turned backward, and hundreds pushed 
on. Their ardor flamed afresh when thirty miles 
south of Tonopah a second " big strike " was made, 
and the town of Goldfield rose over night. The lucky 
locators and lessees began to find out ore whose total 
values ran into the millions in a very few months, and 
In the first year the wealth dug out of the desert 
amounted to more than the production of Cripple 
Creek In Its first two years of activity. Within eigh- 
teen months, nearly ten thousand people were at 
Goldfield, and the railroad had pushed on from 
Tonopah. 

Still the prospectors headed southward, away from 
the town and the railroad, and sixty miles beyond 
Goldfield they were the pioneers In another stirring 
stampede Into the desert. The Bullfrog district 
became the firing line of the gold-seeking Invasion. 
When the gold was found only three families were 
living within eighty-five miles of the location, a 
rancher named Beatty, one Howell, who had a little 
ranch by a spring, and Panamint Joe, a Shoshone 
Indian who was camped with a few of his tribe near 
another spring where there was a patch of watered 
grazing land. In less than a year four thousand 

273 



The Greater America 



people were living in the new-fledged towns of Bull- 
frog, Beatty, and Rhyolite. They were linked with 
the railroad sixty miles away by a line of automobiles, 
daily stages and toiling trains of freighters' wagons. 
Telephone lines were strung across the desert to 
Goldfield, and these isolated, desert-bound settlements 
were in touch with the outside world as soon as they 
were big enough to be named. 

Tonopah, meanwhile, as the oldest of these camps 
along the path of the dusty argonauts, had lost its 
floating population and was in a second stage of solid 
development, with mines in operation and ore going 
by solid train loads to the smelters at Salt Lake. 
Speculation in mining stock succeeded the gambling 
fever of the prospector, and if other excitement was 
wanted, it must be sought in the resorts where the 
faro layout and the roulette wheel held sway. 

Although the " modern improvements " were hur- 
ried into Tonopah and Goldfield with an amazing 
speed that makes this peopling of the desert a modern 
miracle, it was nevertheless a new civilization, whose 
raw edges could not be trimmed off in one year, or 
even five. These are still frontier outposts, although 
they belong to a tamed frontier. They seethe with 
strong, bold currents of life, and men are counted for 
what they are, and not for what they have, as it was 
in the days of old. 

Conspicuous among the veterans of the Klondike 
rush who mingled with Australian, Californian, and 
South African prospectors in the busy Goldfield streets 

274 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

was " Diamondfield Jack " Davis, as rampantly a 
picturesque character as ever enlivened frontier his- 
tory. While mining in Idaho he had achieved the 
unique distinction of being three times sentenced to be 
hanged for the alleged murder of two men in a labor 
war. Twice reprieved, things looked dark for " Dia- 
mondfield Jack " when the fatal day again rolled 
around. His enemies cut the telegraph wires so that 
the governor's message of pardon could not be sent 
through in time to head off the deadly activity of the 
sheriff. The document was hustled along by relays 
of pony riders, and the last rider spurred his foaming 
steed up to the gallows in time to see the noose dan- 
gling about the neck of " Diamondfield Jack." 

It is to be presumed that the courier waved the 
pardon over his head and shouted : " Villain, stay 
your hand. You are about to take the life of an 
innocent man." This touch is needed to round up 
the dramatic units of this lurid episode which real 
life borrowed from the stage. 

" Diamondfield Jack " was treated with respect 
and even deference when I was in Goldfield, and 
although his vivid past shone about him, there was 
nothing of the " bad man " or terror in his common- 
place and industrious demeanor. Later events 
showed, however, that this Davis held in reserve cer- 
tain qualities of character which filled a needed gap 
in the business activities of these desert gold fields. 

Last year the mining camp union, which vain- 
gloriously calls itself the " Industrial Workmen of 

275 



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the World," decided to throw Into total eclipse by 
means of a boycott those enterprising journals, the 
Tonopah Sun and the Goldfield Sun. The editors 
of these twin luminaries were of the pioneer breed, 
and not easily daunted, but the boycotters, because of 
the strength of their labor organization, so coerced 
the merchants of the two camps that they ceased 
advertising. 

The union was not satisfied with this victory, but 
declared that the newspapers could not be sold on the 
streets. The valiant editors stuck to their guns with 
such fusillades as this : 



COME ON, YOU COWARDLY CURS! 



A Committee of the Goldfield I. W. W. Called 
at the Goldfield Sun Office To-Day and 
Notified Four Employees that They Must 
Join the I. W. W. by To-Morrow or Be Eim 
Out of Town. 



The I. W. W. men who made the call 
are Joe Smith, walking delegate for the 
anarchists; a man named Tims, who is a 
member of the fire department, and an- 
other party whose name is not yet known 
here. They demanded that every em- 
ployee join their band of conspirators, 
which flourishes under the name of a 
union. The demand includes printers 
and pressmen, who are members of the 
American Federation to a man. 

Now it is up to the dirty scoundrels to 
start something. The Sun is ready for 
the scoundrels. 

Come on, you cowards, if you are look- 
ing for something. 



276 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

Newsboys were bullied and beaten until none of 
them dared try to sell the papers. After a time four 
brave young men volunteered to peddle the Goldfield 
Sun. They had no more than started on their venture- 
some routes when a mob of union men charged them, 
with oaths and threats and brandished weapons. 
The flight of the newspaper merchants led them 
toward the brokerage office of Mr. " Diamondfield 
Jack " Davis, who was just then engaged in an elo- 
quent eulogy of the shares of certain claims for the 
benefit of an eastern visitor. The mob poured 
through the office door, and Mr. Davis was reason- 
ably annoyed. Rising without haste he unbelted 
two revolvers of prodigious caliber and shoving 
them in the faces of the nearest pursuers he spoke 
in a terse summary of the prevailing fashion in 
slang : 

" I'll give you until I count twenty-three to beat it." 
The mob had unanimously scattered before " Dia- 
mondfield Jack " counted " three," in terror of name 
and weapons combined. He had just returned from 
a visit to San Francisco, and this expressive exhibit 
of the social disorder in Goldfield interested him to 
such an extent that he at once determined to volunteer 
as a newsboy. Thereafter until the boycott was 
broken, the public-spirited Mr. Davis daily paraded 
the streets of Goldfield, a bulky bundle of Suns tucked 
under one arm, and two long-barreled " forty-fours," 
hanging by swivels from his belt. No objections on 

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the part of the miners' union were made a matter of 
public record. 

Allied with Mr. Davis in this defense of private 
rights was Mr. " Black " Allen, editor of the Gold- 
field Sun. He also was a quiet and well-mannered 
man who was ready to back his faith with his works. 
After his life had been threatened by the miners' 
union until the matter wore on his nerves, he saun- 
tered into the headquarters of his assailants. He was 
alone, and local history adds with a touch of pride in 
the fitness of things, that he was carefully dressed 
in a spick-and-span suit of white flannels, a silk shirt, 
and a blue " butterfly " tie. His natty wardrobe 
included also two derringers in the side pockets of 
his flannel coat. Some thirty odd members of the 
*' Industrial Order of the World " were loafing in 
their rooms when this frontier editor of the year of 
our Lord 1906 appeared among them and remarked 
in an even voice: 

" If any of you dirty, cowardly loafers are look- 
ing for trouble, now is the time to begin. I don't 
believe there is one real live man in your whole 
blankety outfit. If there does happen to be one let 
him step to the front and declare himself. You've 
been going to kill me till I'm tired and sick of it." 

There befell a silence that could have been heard 
from Goldfield to the head of Death Valley, and 
while the miners were staring at him, bluffed and 
beaten, the sturdy young man twisted one end of his 

278 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

black mustache with a jaunty air, turned on his heel 
and went back to his desk to prepare a triple-leaded 
editorial headed: 

" Cowardly Bluffers Fail to Make Good Their 
Threats." 

The petulant pop of the pistol is almost unknown 
in the desert, however, and the six-shooter is not a 
commonplace adornment of the well-dressed male. 
The gambling house, saloon and dance hall, however, 
are populous and profitable business enterprises and 
they dot the streets *' gay and frequent." Because 
public gambling Is licensed by law In Nevada, these 
mining camps have a more vivid streak of frontier 
conditions than can be found anywhere else. The 
tanned and dusty men In boots, leggings and cordu- 
roys who throng the streets of Tonopah when the 
day's work is done, flock into the gambling houses 
either to play or to look on by the way of diversion. 

When I drifted Into the " Tonopah Club " the 
bar was crowded and the big room jammed with 
men who were drifting from one gambling table to 
another. There was much heavy play and some 
hard drinking, but no loud talk, no boisterous pro- 
fanity, no ruffianly drunkenness. The place was 
quieter than the average camp meeting. If one was 
looking for surviving phases of the frontier, he would 
be disappointed at first glimpse of so singularly docile 
a gathering. 

But In front of a faro table a brace of grizzled 
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prospectors were "piping" along with fifty-cent chips. 
They were almost cleaned out, and to the average 
town-bred man, whose chief worry is lest he lose his 
job, their situation would seem perilous and even hair 
raising. For they had come in from the desert for a 
" whirl," and when their modest stakes were gone, 
they would be without a dollar in the world. They 
were aware of this fact, but it did not disturb them. 
They had been " broke " many times, and they 
expected to "go broke" many times more. They had 
been prudent enough to buy a little store of bacon, 
beans and flour before they embarked on this ruinous 
evening, and in the morning they would pack their 
burros and trail off into the mountains to live another 
month or two without seeing any other human being 
until they could come back to town for another grub- 
stake. And if they couldn't raise the cash for the 
next grub-stake — well, that time was far distant, and 
it's a poor kind of a man that will worry when he 
has enough to eat for a month ahead. 

So they dutifully and cheerfully went " broke," and 
strolled over to watch a crowd that pressed around a 
roulette table. Three young men in well-worn khaki 
were playing with stacks of twenty-dollar gold pieces 
in lieu of chips. Their speech was that of the campus 
and the club of the eastern seaboard, and it was likely 
that they learned the rudiments of this pastime in a 
metropolitan palace of art presided over by one Rich- 
ard Canfield. They staked twenty dollars on a 

280 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

number and one of them won a thousand dollars with 
two turns of the wheel. Now there was a sudden 
buzz of talk and the word was passed: 

" Here comes Jack C for a whirl. Now 

you'll see some action." 

The little fish retired and made room at the rou- 
lette table for the noted plunger, who had dropped 
in to put into circulation a few thousands' worth of 
the gold he had dug from a near-by hillside. The 
dealer raised the limit to the ceiling, and the stout 
man of the rough-and-ready garb lost ten thousand 
dollars in an hour, and told the bartender to " set up 
champagne for all hands." This generous act cost 
him another thousand, and he swung carelessly out 
to meander among the dance halls, where the jangle 
of battered pianos mingled with that of women's 
voices that had long lost their freshness. 

One of these suddenly rich and prodigal miners, 
in order fittingly to express his esteem for one of these 
nightingales of the desert, vowed in a care-free and 
exhilarated hour that he was going to give her a 
grand piano. The lady protested and said she pre- 
ferred the cash, but he insisted upon the grand piano 
or nothing. After the ponderous instrument had 
been freighted across the desert behind twenty mules, 
at vast expense, it was found that the residence of 
the faded songstress was not big enough to hold it. 

At the time she was living in a one-room shack built 
of lumber ripped from packing cases, as are many 

281 



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residents of to-day, and her house was scarcely larger 
than the piano box. The miner handsomely solved 
the problem when he embarked on his next " whirl," 
for he gave orders that a house be built to hold the 
piano, which was no mean tribute to her charms when 
rough lumber was costing a hundred and thirty dol- 
lars a thousand feet. 

All things are in a state of change in such a town 
as this. The " old-timer " who goes away for three 
months returns to find that most of his friends have 
moved away, or are holding down new jobs. I wasted 
half a day in the company of a mining engineer who 
sought a friend. We found him at length, in com- 
mand of a hardware store. 

" What do you think of him? " said the engineer 
impatiently. " Last year at this time he was janitor 
of the bank. Then he was made assistant cashier, 
next he was made the full-fledged cashier, and then 
he up and opens a hardware store, and It's all hap- 
pened Inside of twelve months." 

My acquaintance inquired for a gambler who had 
been one of the big men of the town three months 
before. 

" He's keeping cases for a faro layout down street 
for four dollars a day wages," was the reply. " He 
had fifty thousand dollars last spring." 

" Where is the professor who blew in to give 
Shakespearean readings just before I went away?" 
was the next query. 

282 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

" Oh, he chucked Shakespeare into the discard, and 
he's deahng faro over in the Tonopah Club." 

Mingled with these ups and downs are the bizarre 
and almost incredible tales of men who have found 
fortunes, almost with the stroke of a pick, in this 
God-forsaken desert, from Tonopah to Bullfrog. All 
kinds and conditions have won or lost in this tre- 
mendous lottery, the college-bred man from the East 
alongside the ragged prospector who had tramped 
the Klondike in vain before he drifted at the call of 
the latest cry of gold. I recall a Yale man in his 
early thirties who told me of his luck: 

" After I got out of college I began work in a 
broker's office in Wall Street, expecting to touch only 
the high places on the road to wealth. After two 
years of it I was starting a crop of wrinkles trying 
to live in New York on my salary, and. I needed 
fresh air bad. I broke out and came West and did 
a number of things. They did not pan out, as you 
may gather when I tell you that I followed the rush 
to Goldfield hoping something would turn up. I had 
forty-five dollars in my clothes, and this wasn't going 
to last long with grub at high-water prices. I applied 
for work in a mine and cinched a job at four dollars 
a day. The boss listened to my plea that I wasn't 
feeling quite fit and wanted to wait a few days before 
sharpening my pick. He promised to hold the job 
for ten days, and I went out prospecting. Inside the 
ten days I had staked a claim and had the ore in sight. 

283 



The Greater America 



It was so good that I cleaned up forty-five thousand 
dollars, and the boss was shy one miner. Oh, yes, I 
have held on to it, and it's working for me in develop- 
ing some other rich properties." 

College men fairly swarm in the gold camps, and 
many of them flocked in as soldiers of fortune. 

" Some fool threw a football into the middle of the 
main street of Goldfield one day," said a prospector. 
" Then he gave a college yell, and twenty men piled 
out of stores and hotels and saloons so fast you 
couldn't count 'em. They lined up without anybody's 
giving the word, and played a game right on the 
jump. They clean wore that football out in no 
time." 

While the college-bred man may find only disap- 
pointment and hardship in such a stormy tide of life 
as this, he quits it, at any rate, with a new respect 
for mankind, a bed-rock democracy of view-point, 
and a stock of elemental courage and self-reliance. 
For there is this to be said of the men of the desert 
and mountains, that they know how to take defeat 
with a smile for the future and a firmer set of the 
jaw for the present. While there are prodigal and 
foolish deeds among the few who find bewildering 
wealth in the earth, a finer wealth of manhood is 
developed In the hearts of the many who fail to find 
that which they seek. 

On a hillside near Goldfield, I found an old 
miner who was sinking a shaft to develop his 

284 




'^ 



The Gold Camps of the Desert 

prospect. There was a white heap of rock, a hole, 
and a hand windlass and bucket to mark the scene of 
his back-breaking endeavor. He was sharpening his 
picks at his little forge, and as he smote the red steel 
with his hammer and thrust it hissing into a water 
bucket, he talked with the clang of his tool for punc- 
tuation. He was gray and he wore spectacles and his 
back was bent. But the seamed and sun-scorched face 
held a certain quality of kindly tolerance of things, 
a kind of tempered patience and sweetness, as if he 
held a grip on a few simple doctrines of life gained 
through hard stress. 

" I've been mining and prospecting for twenty- 
eight years," he said — " in Colorado and Wyoming 
and California (bang, bang) — and in Alaska and 
South Africa (thump, thump) — and I tried it awhile 
in Australia (clang, bang) — I've made two big 
strikes In my time — you might call 'em fortunes 
(s-s-s-s-s-s) — lost 'em both In mining propositions — 
I'm going down a hundred feet here and If I don't 
strike it then I'll quit (bang, thump) — The surface 
rock looks good to me — Hope I'll find some more 
color before my grub-stake runs out — It's hard work, 
but I don't know as I want to do anything else — It 
sort of gets hold of a man after a while so he ain't 
happy unless he's being disappointed and trying 
again." 



285 



CHAPTER XX 

ON THE ROAD TO BULLFROG 

There is another desert breed which is essentially 
modern, and which must be classed as a type of the 
twentieth century mining camp. This is the desert 
chauffeur, who opened the trail of traffic between 
Tonopah and Goldfield, and later drov^e his machines 
on south to the camps of the Bullfrog district. He 
was distinctly picturesque and as thorough-going a 
pioneer in his way as the freighter in his. 

" I can spot one of those desert automobile drivers 
coming up the street as far as I can see him," said a 
man in Goldfield. " After he has been at it a year, 
he looks like a sheep herder. He gets that locoed 
look in his face and the same kind of a wild stare, 
and he looks as if you couldn't get the dust out of his 
system if you ran him through a stamp mill." 

It is one of the many incongruities of these towns 
dumped down in the heart of the desert to see 
the prospector and his burros turn out to dodge the 
high-powered automobiles which snort through the 
unpaved streets in squadrons. Nor have so many 
costly machines been wrecked anywhere as on the 
road (if you may call it such) between Goldfield 
and Bullfrog. It was a stretch of sixty miles of lonely 

286 



On the Road to Bullfrog 



desert, without a town or a house as a refuge in case 
of a breakdown. 

When I made the trip, which was before the rail- 
road had pushed beyond Goldfield, it was as cheerful 
a gamble with respect to reaching your destination 
as putting out to sea in a flat-bottomed skiff. 

The law of the survival of the fittest had wrought 
its pitiless work among the battered machines, and 
from the wreckage loomed the commanding figure of 
one Bill Brown, the only driver who guaranteed to 
get you across whether his auto held together or not. 

He had rebuilt his car several times. So little of 
the original material was left that she suggested the 
present condition of the frigate Constitution. The 
car had been shipped into the desert, ornate, elab- 
orate, equipped with many glittering devices which 
Bill Brown began to eliminate with ruthless hand. 
It should furnish makers and owners of automobiles 
with food for reflection to learn that this Iconoclastic 
chauffeur took a thousand pounds of weight from this 
machine before he had her running to please him. 

To look at this bucking broncho of a car, the novice 
would conclude that Bill Brown had laid violent 
hands upon her and removed most of her vitals at 
random. When he had discarded a vast amount of 
machinery and trimming, he tossed aside the body and 
built a new one from the sides of packing cases to save 
more weight and make room for more passengers. 

Thus humbled and transformed, suggesting a New 
287 



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York club man stripped down to a prospector's outfit 
and set adrift in the desert to shift for himself, the 
car was made to look even less like an automobile. 
Water-kegs and cases of oil and gasoline were 
strapped on her sides, together with enough spare 
tires and parts to reconstruct her at short notice. 
With her engines uncovered, reeking of oil and dust, 
rusty and patched and gaunt, the machine seemed 
to belong to the desert after " Bill " Brown had 
fashioned her to his liking. And like his machine, the 
driver had come to harmonize with the environment. 
He had been in the employ of a New York physician 
before he came West to tame one of these desert 
steeds. It was a far cry from the uniformed and 
dapper chauffeur of the boulevard and the garage 
to the rugged, dusty, self-reliant fighter against odds 
that the desert had made of him in one year. 

" I like it better than I did in New York," said 
Bill, with a smile that struggled through his mask of 
alkali. " I can't tell you why. I guess because this 
comes pretty near being a man's work." 

Sometimes he made the run to Bullfrog in five 
hours. This was when the machine held together. 
He was seldom on the road longer than twelve hours, 
which was a better record than that of other drivers, 
who had been stranded for a day and a night in the 
blazing desolation between the two ports. 

His road twisted through cafions, or lava-strewn 
plains, across the bottom of dead lakes, and through 

288 



On the Road to Bullfrog 



sand that buried his tires. The steering wheel was 
never still as he snaked his old machine through the 
rough going, while the passengers bounded merrily 
from their seats, and wondered while in air whether 
they would come down in or out of the car. 

Twenty miles from anywhere we passed a tent 
which bore the legend, " Saloon and Restaurant." 
Another sign informed us that this tent was the town 
of " Cuprite " and that its reason for being was, 
" First shipment, $238 per ton." The worth of very 
many tons would have been required to hold the aver- 
age man more than five minutes in " Cuprite," but the 
population of four was cheerful and apparently con- 
tented. Far ahead a dust cloud marked the crawling 
progress of a freight outfit, hauling hay and lumber 
to Bullfrog, taking five days to make the sixty-mile 
journey. 

Against the background of sand and mountains 
gleamed a little lake. It was framed in wet marsh 
and green undergrowth, and tall trees marched behind 
it. Presently the machine stormed over this patch 
of desert, and there was nothing but a streak of daz- 
zling white soda and clumps of sagebrush. This dry 
lake whence the mirage had fled was as smooth and 
hard as asphalt, and for a mile Bill Brown " let 
her out," and it was like flying, after the pitching and 
bucking over the desert road. 

" I made the trip by night during the summer," 
said he. " It was too hot in the daytime. Then 

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you did get a run for your money, because I'd miss 
the road now and then and cavort over the rocks till 
I struck it again. But I've been lucky. I never had 
to walk forty miles for help and leave my passengers 
spraddled out in the sand like one of the drivers did, 
with the thermometer playing around a hundred and 
twenty." 

The machine stopped with an ominous rattle. It 
seemed as if Bill Brown had boasted before he 
was out of the woods. He climbed down and looked 
his battle-scarred veteran over. A freighter was 
passing a few hundred yards away. To this outfit 
hastened the resourceful Bill and returned with a 
few feet of wire which he had purloined from a 
bale of hay. With unruffled temper Bill burrowed 
into the stifling dust, somehow utilized the wire to 
hitch his machine together again, and she bounded 
away with renewed and headlong enthusiasm. 

Ten miles from the camp of Beatty, we essayed to 
jump across a gully at a gait of about thirty miles an 
hour. There was a crash and a spill, in which the 
passengers were dumped overside on their several 
heads. Bill Brown rolled out like a shot rabbit, 
and when he scrambled to his feet, surveyed a wrecked 
car. The rear axle had snapped in twain and one 
wheel had rolled on down the gully. A civilized 
driver with a broken axle would have thrown up his 
hands and waited to be towed into harbor. The 
passengers gazed mournfully across the desert and 

290 



Oti the Road to Bullfrog 



thought of the ten-mile walk. The time was the late 
afternoon, and the prospect was not pleasing. But 
Bill remarked with an air of a man who has no 
troubles : 

" This don't amount to shucks. You just loaf 
around and pick wild flowers for half an hour and 
then we'll go on our way rejoicing." 

He extracted a spare axle, a jack and a wrench 
from his machine shop under the seats, collected a 
few rocks of handy size and hummed a little song 
while he toiled. The rear of the car was jacked up 
on a stone underpinning, and the broken axle 
removed, and a new one fitted in thirty-five minutes 
by the watch. 

" I was a little slower than usual," apologized 
Bill. "This gully Is a mean place to break down 
in. You can't get under the machine without build- 
ing up a rock pile first." 

Again the old car buckled down to her task, and 
rattled into Beatty, six hours out from Goldfield. 
There was one long street of tents, and straggling 
away from them were tiny dwellings ingeniously 
walled with tin cracker boxes hammered out flat or 
with gunny sacks, or beer bottles set in adobe, and 
dugouts were burrowing into the hillsides. Beatty 
was five days by freight from a railroad and lumber 
was a staggering luxury. 

Ringed about by painted mountains, whose tower- 
ing slopes were wondrously streaked with crimson and 

291 



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green, the new camp seemed vastly more remote from 
the world of men than could be measured In miles 
of desert. The concentrated essence of American 
enterprise was displayed in a hotel which had been 
opened a few days before our arrival. It was a big 
square, wooden building of two stories, which stood 
forth In this town of tents and shacks like a battle ship 
amid a fishing fleet. And one had to fare to this far 
corner of the country to find that " welcome at an 
Inn " which cities have forgotten. Waiting on the 
porch was Mrs. Casey, the landlord's wife, blowing a 
horn and cheerily calling: 

" Dinner's hot and waiting. Come In to the best 
hotel in a hundred miles." 

A piano was busy in the parlor, there were mission 
furniture and big lounging chairs in the oflice, and 
at the dining room door tarried, with smiling counte- 
nance, a plump and ruddy waiter with a white mus- 
tache, who was an animated evidence of good living. 

It seems worth while to recall some of the items 
of that memorable menu down at Casey's, In the 
camp of Beatty, not far from the edge of Death 
Valley, amid as ghastly an isolation of natural back- 
ground as can be found on the globe : 

" Utah celery, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, 
roast spring chicken, lettuce salad, corn on the cob, 
green apple pie, English plum pudding, apples and 
grapes, and fresh milk." 

There were telephones In the bedrooms, bathtubs 
292 



On the Road to Bullfrog 



and running water, a plate-glass bar and two spick- 
and-span roulette wheels; in short, all the comforts 
of home and most of the luxuries. 

In the starlit evening the untiring Bill Brown 
limbered up his scarred chariot and drove us over to 
Bullfrog, five miles away. The lamps went out dur- 
ing the journey, but Bill was not disturbed. He 
drove at top speed and occasionally lost the rocky 
trail. At such times the car careened on two wheels, 
came down with a grunt, and hurdled a few bowlders. 
But with unshaken energy the machine boomed Into 
Bullfrog, and by a miracle of luck the passengers 
were still inside. 

At the hotel, which at that time was almost the 
only wooden building In Bullfrog, we chanced to meet 
a sharp-featured, boyish-looking young man, George 
Wingfield by name. Three years before this he 
had been a cow puncher, and tradition has It that 
he landed In Tonopah with assets of twenty-five dol- 
lars. Gambling *' looked good to him " as offering 
an opening for a strong and willing young man who 
was Intent on piling up a fortune with the least possi- 
ble delay. Millions were being talked all around him 
and he wanted a few of them. His good luck was 
so extraordinary that In a few months he was able 
to buy out a controlling Interest In the " Tonopah 
Club." 

Then he was able to stake prospectors in the more 
fascinating gamble for gold claims. He sent these 

293 



The Greater America 



hardy pilgrims out to right and left, reckoning that 
a few " grub-stakes " and burros were worth risking 
even if only one man in twenty should find gold. 
Within the year young WIngfield had Interests In 
several of the richest desert claims, and was speeding 
over the hot sands in the biggest, reddest automobile 
in all Nevada. Within three years from the time 
he had been punching cattle he was worth a million. 
Meanwhile United States Senator Nixon had become 
interested In this quiet, shrewd gambler, and took 
him into business partnership. Later, however, the 
Senator has urged young WIngfield to forego his 
proprietorship of the " Tonopah Club," as a feature 
of his business activities which might cause caustic 
comment in Washington touching the alliance. 

It occurred to me while I was eating ham and eggs 
alongside this George WIngfield in the Bullfrog hotel 
that there was romance left even in money getting. 
Here was a modern buccaneer, if you please, who had 
diced with fortune, and won by means of daring and 
enterprise as bold as ever sent men to fight for gold 
that lay in the holds of tall galleons. He had " made 
his stake " as a gambler, but In this corner of the 
West your honest gambler is as respectable a figure 
as a Standard Oil king of the Atlantic seaboard. I 
found that young WIngfield was one of the most 
respected and popular men of the desert not because 
he is rich, but because he is square and fearless and 
generous. I heard not long ago that he has piled up 

294 





"^ 







On the Road to Bullfrog 



such huge Interests in mining operations that his in- 
come is about two hundred thousand dollars a year. 
He belongs with a modern generation of " Bonanza 
Kings " .whose beginnings are no more bizarre and 
rude and lawless than those of earlier argonauts 
whose descendants squander the wealth of the Com- 
stock lode. 

Inasmuch as a man would have to pack water on 
his back to camp on this site, the town of Bullfrog 
was named by a man of high-powered fancy. The 
camp had another distinction in that it was the last 
outpost of the gold seeker. To push on toward the 
south meant a journey of a hundred and twenty-five 
miles to reach the nearest railroad, within sight of 
the Funeral Range, whose ramparts march along 
Death Valley. 

Bullfrog was somewhat in the condition of a man 
with a thousand-dollar bank note in his pocket who 
is likely to go hungry before he can break it. 
The rush was over, and the hills were speckled with 
claims and the ore was there. The hundreds who 
tarried to hold down their locations and wait for 
something to turn up lacked capital to take out the 
ore; and when they had It on the dump, they were 
so far from a railroad that hauling It over the desert 
cut too heavily Into the profits. Therefore they sat 
tight and held on, waiting for the railroad which must 
come to them in a few months. Meantime there was 
much gold In the hills and little cash In the camp. 

295 



TJie Greater America 



But hopes were high, and it was good to see the rows 
of tents that stood for pluck and courage, on the fir- 
ing line of civilization. 

Next day I was invited to lunch at one of the show 
mines of this district. Bob Montgomery was one 
of the tribe of desert prospectors when he stum- 
bled upon this bonanza. When I saw it the miners 
had been crosscutting and tunneling into the white 
and chalk-like rock only a few months. They had 
piled up several thousands of tons of ore that was 
worth from $200 to $700 a ton. It was crumbly 
stuff that looked like lime, and it held no free gold 
that the eye could see. It was costing fifty dollars a 
ton to freight it to a smelter, but it paid to ship such 
ore as this out of the remote desert. Inside the mine, 
a huge mass of ore had been blocked out which 
assayed from $230 to $1,500 a ton. The experts 
estimated that three million dollars' worth of ore was 
already in sight. Taking it out was the cleanest and 
easiest mining imaginable. The soft, clean talc cut 
almost like cheese, and it was like removing sacks of 
gold from a vault. After a glimpse of such treasure 
finding as this, it was possible to understand the exu- 
berant declaration of a wild-eyed young citizen of 
Bullfrog: 

" Give us time enough and we'll demonetize gold." 
The story of one such strike as this lures thousands 
into the desert, and they paint another and a con- 
trasting picture. For many are called and few are 

296 



On the Road to Bullfrog 



chosen by the fickle fortune that directs the trail of 
the gold hunter. Where these thousands of adven- 
turous men of broken fortunes come from, and where 
they drift to when the stampede has passed, Is one 
of the mysteries of the " gold strike." They leave 
behind them, however, cities where there was a desert, 
they help to redeem the waste places and in their 
wake is new wealth that flows Into every artery of the 
nation's material welfare. 

Twenty thousand people have been already added 
to the population of Nevada, and many millions In 
money to her resources. And the hero and the 
creator of it all Is the dusty prospector with his hardy 
burros, his canteen, his blankets and his gold pan and 
hammer. Behind him comes the army of careless 
and high-hearted Invaders, whose truly American 
war cry is : 

*' If It looks good to yoUj get to It." 



297 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE MEN OF THE UNTAMED DESERT 

It was in the camp of Bullfrog that Mitchell, the big, 
brick-red mining man of Nevada, told me his view of 
law on the desert : 

" If you are prospecting with an unreasonable hog 
of a partner, who wants to eat three slices of bacon 
and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, and lets the 
canteen gurgle down his throat, while you get along 
with a strip of bacon and just moisten your lips when 
you take a drink, then you're all right if you kill him, 
I'd kill him if there wasn't anything else to do. It's 
a tough game, and it's your life or his when you're 
lost or your grub-stake and water are giving out." 

These observations were suggested by the arrival 
in camp two days before of the bones of a prospector 
who had died of thirst some forty miles from Bull- 
frog during the previous summer. He had been a 
carpenter, earning wages of eight dollars a day in the 
new camps during the " boom," but the gold fever 
led him away from this safe and profitable toil. He 
picked up a partner, they loaded their burros and 
trailed off south toward the Death Valley country to 
prospect in the Funeral Range. 

Three weeks after the desert swallowed them 
up the partner wandered into a freighters' camp, 

298 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

half-crazed with thirst and exhaustion. He was able 
to tell the freighters that the carpenter was some- 
where out beyond, lost and without water, too helpless 
to move. The partner was too weak and fevered to go 
back with the rescue party of freighters, so they left 
him in camp. He directed them as well as he could, 
but the search was bootless, and Griffin, the carpenter 
of Bullfrog, was added to the long list of desert vic- 
tims. Several months later a party of prospectors 
stumbled, by chance, across what was left of him. 
There were no traces of his outfit; he had thrown 
away his gun, his canteen and his hat. One shoe was 
found thirty feet from his body, and he had torn off 
and flung away most of his clothing. These were the 
ghastly evidences of the last great fight he had made 
to struggle on. 

" When they're dying for water," said Mitchell, 
who knew the " desert game," " they throw away 
everything until all their clothes are gone, and you 
generally find them without a stitch on." 

To those who have not been in the Nevada desert 
it seems almost incredible that men should wander 
there and die, a dozen or more every summer, and 
that others will follow them and die of thirst in there 
so long as there are inaccessible mountains to be 
searched for gold. Nor is it always the heedless 
prospector that loses his life by daring the desert. I 
heard many of these stories while crossing this stretch 
of country, and passed more than one little heap of 

299 



The Greater America 



lava fragments that marked the grave of a victim of 
thirst, but that which made the most haunting impres- 
sion ran as follows : 

A prosperous mining man of Delamar, Nevada, 
started to drive from his home to Pioche, an old 
silver-mining camp which was a large and tumultuous 
city thirty years ago. Pioche lay across an expanse 
of desert, but the driv^er had made the trip many 
times and had no more thought of danger than if he 
were taking a train for San Francisco. He had a 
good pair of horses and a buckboard in which he 
stowed a full canteen, food and a keg of water for 
his horses. With good luck he expected to cover the 
distance between daylight and dark, and to return 
home next day. It was hardly worth saying good-by 
to his family. 

Somewhere out in the sand and sagebrush he got 
out of his buckboard, for what purpose no one knows. 
It may have been to adjust the harness, or to kill a 
rattlesnake with his whip. By an almost incredible 
twist of fate it happened that he would have been a 
luckier man to jump from the deck of a liner into mid- 
ocean. His horses took fright and ran away and left 
him. They wandered into Delamar on the day after, 
and the empty buckboard told the town that disaster 
had overtaken the driver. 

A party was hastily equipped and the wheel tracks 
were followed until dark. Then a dry camp was 
made and the search was picked up on the following 

300 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

day. When they found the man only three days had 
elapsed since he left home. He was naked and stark 
mad. He became conscious for a little while, long 
enough to tell how the tragedy had happened, and he 
died soon after they carried him home, of thirst, 
fever and a shattered mind. 

" Why didn't he follow his wagon tracks back 
home?" said the man from Delamar who was re- 
minded to tell the story. " It's most likely that he 
did try for a little way, and then he went off his head, 
just scared crazy at the bare thought of being lost on 
foot out there with no water In thirty or forty miles, 
and he figured that he could never make the distance, 
and that made him locoed. Or maybe he thought 
he saw a spring and lost the trail and couldn't find it 
again. The desert plays queer tricks with a man's 
thinkin' outfit." 

When I was in Bullfrog in the autumn of 1905 a 
stage line had been recently put across a stretch of a 
hundred and twenty-five miles of this desert to connect 
the new gold camps with the railroad which runs from 
Los Angeles to Salt Lake. It was a hardy and ven- 
turesome enterprise, backed by the Kimball Brothers, 
two young men of the stuff that men are made of in 
the new West. They came naturally by their liking 
for the stage business, for their father had been one 
of the partners in the Overland Mail when Ben Holli- 
day was making a new highway across the continent. 

To set this desert enterprise going they had to 
301 



The Greater America 



establish supply and water stations, for in the route 
of a hundred and twenty-five miles there were only 
two springs, and not a human being except for the 
lonely ranchers that dwelt in these two little oases. 
Three wells were driven, so that water stations were 
about thirty miles apart, and by these wells were 
pitched the tents of the station-keepers who fed and 
watered the change horses. 

There was no way traffic, and the revenues must 
come from the daily mail contract and the few pas- 
sengers who went through to the gold camps or came 
out to the railroad at twenty-five dollars a head. 
Whether or not the young men gained profit by the 
enterprise, they were sure of the distinction of oper- 
ating the loneliest and most forbidding stage route 
in the United States. 

When I decided to come out of Bullfrog by this 
route my acquaintances agreed that the Idea was 
wholly asinine. 

" Go back to Goldfield in an automobile and take 
a train for Reno," they chorused. " That stage trip 
to Las Vegas Is the worst ever. Those who have 
lived through it swear they'll die here of old age 
before they'll try to escape the way they came in. 
It's the limit." 

The project sounded so uncommonly forbidding 
that It seemed well worth undertaking. Surely the 
kind of men who drove and supplied the stage line, 
as well as the wayfarers to be met along the route, 

302 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

were helping to build up the unpeopled places after 
their own solitary fashion, and they would be far 
more worth knowing than the commonplace traveling 
acquaintances one is wont to make in the beaten ruts 
of railway journeying. 

The stage halted to pick me up at the Beatty hotel 
in the Bullfrog district at five o'clock in the morning. 
The starlit night was yet chill with the windless and 
crystalline air that refreshes the desert when the sun 
has left it. A covered Concord wagon pulled by two 
horses came slowly up the tented street that was ankle 
deep in white alkali dust. 

Here and there a canvas wall glimmered from an 
early candlelight within. The little camp, cuddled 
in the rugged arms of the mountains that locked It 
round about, seemed very lonely and almost forlorn, 
so far it was from the more permanent habitations 
of men and women, so brave an outpost of a civiliza- 
tion that has almost outgrown this kind of pioneering. 
It needed the talk and stir of its rough-clad, sun- 
burned men in the raw, new streets, and the noise of 
pick and blast in the prospect holes that burrowed the 
slopes, to detach it from the lifeless silence that 
brooded over the desert. 

There were no other passengers for the stage, and 
the driver welcomed me like a long-lost brother, for 
he did not like to drive his thirty-mile stretch alone. 
We passed out through a gap in the mountains and 
they were just beginning to flush with the singular 

303 



The Greater America 



glory of the desert dawn. In the wake of a shroud- 
ing haze of blue, which lingered briefly, came a 
crimson flush that touched first the crests of the 
mountains, then stole swiftly down their sides, and 
the day leaped into being. 

While it was yet early morning we passed through 
a tiny camp called Gold Center. Gold had not been 
found there, and it was the center of nothing except 
sand and mountains. It was, in a way, left stranded 
in the ebb of the roaring tide of the first rush a few 
months before, when the vanguard of the invaders 
took it hilariously for granted that gold must be 
everywhere in these mountains. 

The more rational settlements of Beatty and Bull- 
frog lay only a few miles away, yet Gold Center 
persisted in being, and, mirahile dictu, misguided 
initiative was erecting a brewery in the camp, which 
was as far removed from malt and hops as It was 
possible to find this side of Hades. We stopped to 
pick up a passenger who was waiting at the canvas 
saloon, fittingly named " The Last Chance." The 
driver, in an ill-timed spirit of jest, observed to the 
shaggy landlord : 

*' How are things in Dead Center? " 

" Dead Center! humph! " indignantly snorted the 
leading citizen. *' For two cents I'd pull you off that 
broken-down hearse and spill you all over Gold Cen- 
ter, which is booked to be the best camp in the State 
of Nevada. Busted prospectors that have to drive 

304 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

stage to get a grub-stake mustn't come round here 
passing any gay remarks about ' Dead Center.' " 

The passenger was tactful enough to add no fuel 
to this blaze as he clambered into the wagon and 
shook the dust of Gold Center from his battered 
boots. He slumped into the collar of his faded over- 
coat beside the driver, and pulled down over his eyes 
a dilapidated soft hat, which in itself was eloquent 
of many things suffered in desert wandering. 

He was a chunky, elderly man, with a blue eye, a 
flaming ruddiness of countenance and a thatch of tow 
hair which defied the onslaught of years to turn it 
gray. Ever and anon this Bill Crump extracted 
a bottle from his pocket, offered it to the driver, who 
always refused with a melancholy gesture, and drank 
therefrom a " slug to keep the chill off," with a deft- 
ness which gave weight to his claim that he was a son 
of old Kentucky. They were an oddly contrasting 
pair, the stout and garrulous Crump and the driver, 
who was a lanky man with a subdued and even 
chastened air, as if life were bound to be a losing 
fight. 

Yet they were kindred spirits, in that both had 
been rolling stones along the outer edge of civiliza- 
tion, and old age was overtaking them with naught 
to show for the long years except an amazing variety 
of experiences. 

Crump faced the future stoutly with a flamboyant 
courage, and you could picture in your mind's eye 

305 



The Greater America 



this battered, sturdy figure shaking his fist at fortune 
in city and camp and desert, always making the best 
of it and letting the morrow go hang. 

As for the stage driver, he was and would be a 
dreamer to the end, industrious, sober, but never 
making a winning fight against the realities, moving 
on with an air of resignation to find the vision still 
beyond his grasp. Crump had just quit a government 
surveying party, with which he had been horse- 
wrangler for four months. The expedition was mov- 
ing into Death Valley, to make the first map of that 
unpleasant region, and Crump decided that he needed 
change of occupation. 

" I'm going to spend the winter in Los Angeles," 
he explained, with his enduring bravado. " I need 
rest and change. I'm a furniture-maker by trade. 
My chest of tools is In hock, but I'll get it out and 
make money and mix up with good people." 

His versatility had Included many years of driving 
stage. Indeed, he could rake up memories of stage 
routes In Texas forty years ago, but heaven only 
knows how many things Crump had turned his hand 
to In the meantime. The driver had been fairly con- 
sistent as a miner " on and off " for twenty-five years. 
Last year he prospected In the desert for nine months 
and found nothing. Now he was full of a scheme to 
return to Alaska and outfit a party to trap for furs 
and Incidentally look for gold. There was no chance 
of failure, he argued, and whoever should be bold 

306 



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The Men of the Untamed Desert 

enough to grub-stake him would inevitably reap a 
dazzling reward. 

He was driving stage only until he could turn 
miner again. He had seen the partners of his youth 
make great strikes and become the millionaires of 
Utah and Colorado. His own failures had not 
soured him. He was inclined to believe that every 
man got a square deal sooner or later, and his turn 
was coming, of course it was. Crump was not look- 
ing an inch beyond his florid nose, even when he 
talked so large about his plans for the winter, while 
the driver was continually dwelling with the visions 
that were as impalpable as the desert mirages. 

When the sun swiftly climbed clear of the curtain- 
ing mountains the desert began to swim in a glare of 
heat. To the right ran the naked heights of the 
Charleston mountains, while a few miles to the left 
was the grim Funeral Range, beyond which lay Death 
Valley. Between these towering ranges stretched the 
desert, over which the stage crawled like a fly on a 
whitewashed floor. Through a notch in the Funeral 
Range we could see across Death Valley to the moun- 
tains which lifted high on the other side of it. There 
was something inexpressibly forbidding and mys- 
terious about this view-point in the desert. 

For Death Valley has been for long a fabled place, 
In which have been focused many strange and dread- 
ful stories, some of them true. It is one of the hottest 
corners on the globe, because, while Bullfrog, only 

307 



Tlie Greater America 



thirty miles from the head of it, is four thousand feet 
above the sea, this narrow valley between two moun- 
tain ranges drops to a depth below sea level. There- 
fore it becomes a furnace in which no air is stirring. 
It is perilous to life because good water can be found 
in only two or three places in a length of more than 
a hundred miles, while there are many poison springs, 
fatal to man and beast. 

It is bad enough, in truth, without need of exag- 
gerated pen pictures such as the western correspon- 
dent loves to paint. If any disaster to outfit occurs, 
if the canteen runs dry, if a man should fall and 
break a leg while prospecting in the valley, he were 
wise to blow out his brains to avoid lingering in slow 
torture. A veteran prospector who had crossed 
Death Valley three times, and was known among 
his fellows as a man of unsurpassed physique, hardi- 
hood and experience, told me what he thought of 
the journey while we were in camp together in the 
desert : 

" It's plumb foolishness to go into Death Valley 
with less than three or four men in your party, and 
twelve to fifteen burros. Load four or five burros 
with hay and barley for their own feed, three or 
four with canned stuff, flour and bacon, and at least 
four with water, and If you don't get lost you will 
pull through all right. There's gold in there, though 
I don't take any stock In Scotty and his mysteri- 
ous mine. He's a four-flusher. There's prospectors 

308 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

ransacking the Death Valley country all the time, and 
you can't hide a rich mine in this country any more 
than you can hide a brick building in a town." 

You cannot cross the Nevada desert without hear- 
ing much gossip about " Scotty," he of the meteoric 
special trains and the colossal bluffs. A " busted 
cow puncher " with an exotic imagination, he has 
juggled fact and fancy until the shrewdest men in 
the Southwest lock horns in argument as to whether 
" Scotty " has a mine In Death Valley or dreamed it. 
When I met him he was coming out of the desert 
with a bag of ore on a burro and the announcement: 

" I'm due to take a little whirl down the road. I'm 
going to bluff old Harriman out of his boots. I'll bet 
him fifty thousand dollars I can beat him In a race 
from, the Coast to Chicago, me taking a special on the 
Santa Fe and that old figger-head pulling out on the 
Union Pacific. I'm afraid he'll take water. He's a 
counterfeit, on the level, he is. 

" They say I've killed fifteen men just to see 'em 
kick," continued " Scotty," as he cocked his hat over 
one eye. " It ain't so. I wouldn't do no such thing. 
They don't know me. I fool 'em all. I've got a pair 
of glasses that can see fifty miles, and a gun that 
shoots five miles, and when they try to trail me Into 
the Valley I run blazers on 'em. I'm due for a little 
race down the pike behind an engine. Maybe I've 
got a mine and maybe not. Maybe it's on Furnace 
Creek, In the Funeral Range, Death Valley, and 

309 



The Greater America 



maybe It's somewhere else, and maybe I ain't got a 
cent." 

A bizarre figure of a man who harmonizes im- 
mensely well with the romantic mystery of Death 
Valley, " Scotty " has managed to find and somehow 
maintain the notoriety that is dear to his soul. To 
my knowledge he *' blew in " on his " whirl " some 
six or eight thousand dollars advanced under a grub- 
stake contract by a hypnotized New York banker, 
which funds were to be used in developing the alleged 
mining properties. " Scotty " refused to tell his 
backer where the mine was, and squandered all the 
money advanced, which accounts for a good part 
of his flaming prosperity. As a type of the vanish- 
ing West, he makes a crudely picturesque figure 
against the dull background of a tamed civilization. 

While the stage toiled through the sand and the 
choking dust clouds at the depressing speed of three 
miles an hour, there moved in the far distance 
another pillar of alkali powder, heralding the ap- 
proach of a freight outfit. By and by there emerged 
from this gray veil the long string of eighteen mules, 
stepping out with brave and patient endurance, pull- 
ing the linked trail wagons no more than ten or twelve 
miles in a day. The " mule skinner " in the saddle of 
a wheeler and the " swamper " trudging alongside 
exchanged quiet greeting with the stage driver from 
the enveloping fog: 

" How are you? " 

310 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

" All right; how are you? " 

" Pretty good." 

The passing was like that of two ships at sea. The 
freighters were ten days out from Las Vegas. One 
trail wagon was loaded with hay and water kegs, 
for they must make dry camps between wells, and 
they moved over the face of the desert with a lonely 
deliberation that made an impression of large and 
patient self-reliance. Scarcely anywhere in America 
could they be found outside of the desert. Nor 
would they linger much longer even here, for the rail- 
road was creeping along their trail and soon they 
would be of a piece with the other relics of the genu- 
inely " simple life " which has made a nation of a 
wilderness. 

At noon we stopped at a tent where there was a 
driven well. The keeper of the station lived here 
with his wife, and there were no other dwellers within 
thirty miles of them. Nothing grew around them but 
the sagebrush, nothing else could be made to grow 
without water. There was not a tree within a day's 
journey. But this cheerful, kindly, gray-haired man 
and his motherly wife said that they liked the desert. 
Perhaps it was because their faces hinted that home 
and contentment are where the heart is. A stage 
each way within the twenty-four hours, the occasional 
freight outfit or prospector that tarried for water — 
these were their only visitors. There were no 
neighbors. 

311 



The Greater America 



The heat beat down on their shadeless tents as 
from a furnace, and the uneasy dust was always sift- 
ing into food and clothing and blankets. But their 
contentment in each other and the inscrutable fascina- 
tion of the desert had turned the edge of their 
hardships. 

A change of drivers was made, and a white-bearded 
patriarch turned back with us to drive over the same 
forty miles he had just covered northward bound. 

" When you get home," he chuckled as he picked 
up the reins, " tell 'em you rode one stage with old 
Pop Gilbert, that crossed the plains with his dad 
'way back in Fifty. We set out with ox teams to go 
from Illinois to California and we were six months 
on the way. Dad didn't like it out there, and being 
a sudden man he turned round and trailed back to 
Illinois. I'm still pretty chipper." 

He was a " chipper " veteran of the frontier, for 
after a conversation with the invincible Crump and a 
pull at the black bottle, he became interested in the 
government survey lately forsaken by this passenger 
and asked: 

" S'pose there's a chance for me to get that job 
you throwed up? I like bosses, and Death Valley's 
one place where I hain't been. I don't mind hot 
weather. I'm a desert lizard, and my hide's turned 
to leather." 

Crump was discouraging, but " Pop " prattled for 
some time about missing this chance to be baked alive 

312 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

in Death Valley. It seemed absurd that danger 
should menace along a trail rutted by the wheel tracks 
of the stage, but in mid-afternoon we came up with 
an unexpected suggestion of the implacable hostility 
of these waste places. The stage had covered per- 
haps twenty miles from the noon-time camp, and the 
next station lay about the same distance beyond. A 
solitary man was staggering on ahead, reeling from 
one side of the trail to the other, frequently halting 
to throw himself flat on the sand and then more 
weakly scrambling on. Far in advance, mere dots 
on the horizon, were three other figures on foot. 

Presently the voice of the derelict floated back in 
incoherent cries. He was so absorbed in trying to 
overtake those far ahead of him that he paid no heed 
to the stage until it was beside him. Then he fell 
on his knees with wild gestures and husky pleadings 
in Spanish. It seemed that the vanishing dots beyond 
were companions with whom he had set out to walk 
from the Bullfrog camps to the railroad. They had 
only two canteens among them, and since leaving the 
last well their water had given out, and his strength 
had been the first to break. 

They had pushed on in desperation, leaving him to 
fall by the wayside, and as Crump expressed it, " the 
Greaser was all in." The pitiable wretch was given 
a lift in the stage, and a pull at the driver's big can- 
teen. When his callous comrades were overtaken 
they were fluently cursed by old man Crump in vivid 

313 



The Greater America 



Spanish, and their canteens were filled for them, after 
which the abandoned one was dumped among them 
to shift for himself. 

Of a different metal was the old prospector met a 
little while later. He was really an amazing figure 
of a man. Bent and partly crippled with rheumatism, 
he was trudging along alone, with no burros, and not 
even a blanket on his back. He had not a cent in 
his pocket, and his outfit consisted of a canteen and 
a paper parcel of bacon and biscuit given him by a 
generous freighter. While we stopped to breathe the 
horses in the sand, which made walking like pulling 
through a heavy snow, the old man made cheerful 
chat with us. He had been working a claim in the 
Funeral Range through the summer, and his grub- 
stake having run out, he was footing it into the min- 
ing camps to look for work to tide him over the 
winter. He pulled a few chunks of rock from his 
pockets, gazed at them with an expression of the 
most radiant confidence, and said that on the strength 
of these samples he proposed to save enough money 
from his wages to outfit in the spring and return to 
his mountain solitude. Here was a man for you, who 
preached a concrete gospel of faith, hope and works. 

In the early evening we toiled through a canon 
or " wash," and found a tent inhabited by a youth in 
charge of a " dry camp." He was somewhat peevish 
as he protested: 

" I've watered your fresh team of horses, but 
314 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

they drunk every drop I had, and there ain't enough 
left to make a pot of coffee. What am I going to 
do? If you don't send me back a barrel from Indian 
Spring in the morning, I'm up against it hard. I ain't 
a kicker, but likewise I ain't a lizard to live without 
water." 

Now the stage crept along over a rolling country 
In which the darkness conjured many delusions and 
fantasies. We always seemed to be climbing the 
white trail that streaked the night, even when the 
desert was tilting downward. One could see, or 
thought he saw, houses, railroad grades, even trains 
of cars. These were only the shadowed shapes of 
bleak buttes and uncouth fragments of landscape that 
had been gashed by cloud-bursts tearing down from 
the distant mountain sides. The " Joshua trees," dis- 
torted caricatures of verdure, became clothed with an 
uncanny vagueness of aspect. Their twisted, spiked 
limbs took on the shapes of men who were crawling 
over the sand, or crouching in wait, or gesturing either 
In threat or appeal. All sense of proportion had van- 
ished with the daylight. One's eyes were no longer 
to be relied upon. A low-hung star, barely veiled 
behind the ragged crest of a mountain " wash," cast 
an upward reflection which so well mimicked the glow 
of a distant camp fire that a lost tenderfoot would 
have struggled toward It, believing help was near. 

Long after midnight we came to whispering trees 
around a spring, the first oasis In twenty hours of 

315 



The Greater America 



travel from Bullfrog, and as grateful a resting place 
as ever the school-day geographies pictured of a palm- 
fringed well in the Sahara. Water had done a mira- 
cle here, and when we pushed on at daylight after a 
few hours' sleep in a tent, green fields and pastured 
cattle were glimpsed, and the growing crops that 
sweetly contrasted with the desolation round about. 
The rancher who made breakfast for the stage crew 
had lived in this place for many years, and by choice, 
for he said in parting : 

" I went back to my old home in Vermont last 
year, and I didn't hanker to stay there. This place 
looked good to me when I drove in again." 

Almost all that day the road led across the desert, 
until in the waning afternoon we were within sight 
of the town of Las Vegas, which had come suddenly 
into being when the new railroad to Salt Lake 
marched through this region. At one end of the 
new town, in a grove of splendid trees, are the adobe 
walls of a ranch and fort built by the Mormon pio- 
neers when they pushed through Utah to Lower 
California in 1851. We had crossed their old trail 
on the previous day, and the road they made is still 
used to pass through the Meadow Valley Wash, 
where a party of scores of men, women and children 
perished together in that first heroic pilgrimage. A 
stone marks the place where their bones were found. 

Over this route they pushed southward until they 
came to Las Vegas, and, wonder of wonders, found a 

316 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

spring that gushed from the thirsty plain like a young 
river. Here they camped and rested and refitted 
before the caravan moved along its four months' 
journey to the San Bernardino Valley. The new 
railroad, built by Senator Clark, follows through 
Nevada and Utah that old Mormon trail for much 
of its length. Nor are the crumbling adobe walls 
of the old ranch at Las Vegas the only relics of that 
other age in the building of the West. When the 
grading camps of the railroad were moving up 
through the desert, they found the bleached bones of 
many of those pioneers, and buried them beside the 
track. I met an old man who crossed the desert 
even before the gold rush of Forty-nine, and who saw 
the Mormon vanguard on its march to Utah. 

" There were six hundred wagons," said he, " mov- 
ing in a trail of six abreast, and we saw the dust which 
they made for two days before we overtook them." 

The Mormons proved that water could make a 
garden of this desert area, and now, half a century 
later, Nevada, in the wake of Utah, is beginning to 
feel the stimulus of an irrigation movement which is 
certain to make for her greater wealth and population 
than all the gold and silver that have been found in 
her mountains. 

Said President Roosevelt at Reno three years ago: 

" And now here in Nevada a new future opens to 
you because of the energy, the foresight and the far- 
sighted intelligence of those who have recognized the 

317 



The Greater America 



absolute need of using for the tillage of your fields 
the waters that run to waste in your rivers. It would 
be difficult to find in the United States a locality bet- 
ter fitted to serve as an object lesson in the need of 
irrigation and the use of it." 

The men who have been the scouts in the invasion 
of the desert, the hardy, patient pioneers of the gold 
camps, the prospecting outfits, the freight wagons and 
the stage lines, bulk big among the builders of this 
part of the West. Behind them, however, there will 
flock a population which will make its permanent 
settlement even in such a hopeless-looking desert as 
I have tried briefly to picture. 

The irrigation work of the national government 
has made its first great conquest in this same Nevada. 
Into this parched sand and sagebrush the water was 
turned last year from the works of the " Carson and 
Truckee Project." It was the most important event 
in the history of the State, of more lasting value even 
than the discovery of the Comstock lode. From the 
massive masonry dam, constructed to hold the waters 
of the Truckee River, the blessed flow was turned 
over fifty thousand acres. 

This was the first completed section of a plan which 
is to irrigate almost a million acres of desert. This 
means, within a few years, fifty-acre farms for twenty 
thousand families, on which they are certain of large 
and profitable crops. It means also new towns and 
cities to supply this great farming community with 

318 




tt. 



The Men of the Untamed Desert 

the products of the mills and mines and factories of 
the country, east and west. 

More than that, it means a new population of per- 
haps two hundred thousand souls and a prosperous 
principality added to the greatness of the Union. It 
is all purely creative, for wealth is made where there 
was none before, and magnificent opportunity offered 
for independent and self-reliant livelihood to those 
who seek it. 

When one has seen the desert at close range, and 
then views the great beginnings of its redemption by 
means of water, he becomes impressed with the fact 
that there are two sides to the " Mormon question." 
Their wagon trains marked the path for the first sur- 
vey of the first transcontinental railroad. And they 
pushed on into and claimed for their own a territory 
so forbidding that other pioneers shunned it as they 
would the shadow of death. Before the sun had set 
on the second day of the Mormon camp in the Salt 
Lake valley work had begun on the first irrigation 
ditch ever constructed by Anglo-Saxon hands. 

The teeming mining camp may pass. Nevada is 
a graveyard of dead camps. In the seventies Vir- 
ginia, Pioche, Belmont, Jefferson, Ely, flaunted what 
they believed was inexhaustible mineral wealth. 
Their streets roared with life and activity, their hills 
echoed to the thunder of stamp mills and hoisting 
engines. Their shacks hold a hundred people where 
once thousands toiled and planned and hoped. Their 

319 



TJie Greater America 



smelters, furnaces and tall chimneys are rusted and 
forlorn. But the water that is being turned into the 
desert brings with it an enduring prosperity that will 
eclipse all the present-day gold bearing of Tonopah 
and Bullfrog. 



320 



CHAPTER XXII 

IN CONCLUSION 

"The Booster " is the most characteristic and 
stimulating figure in that vast territory that runs west- 
ward from the Great Lakes. He is banging his 
cymbals in Duluth and St. Paul and Minneapolis, 
from Spokane to Seattle, in Tacoma and Portland. 
His clarion note rings shrill down the Pacific Coast 
to Los Angeles and beyond. He is shouting the 
praises of his country and community in Salt Lake 
and Denver, and Texas has awakened to hearken to 
the din that he makes in Dallas and Galveston. Nor 
are his efforts confined to the cities that are clamoring 
for population and capital. Whether it be a tiny 
colony of pioneers tucked away in a remote valley 
of the Columbia, or a settlement of fruit growers in 
a far corner of California, Promotion Committees, 
Commercial Clubs, Boards of Trade and '' Boost- 
ers " unattached are lying awake nights to map out 
campaign literature and devise new stratagems for 
making their " garden spot " known to the world 
at large. 

This is the spirit of the newer West, a spirit of 
close-knit community interest in which the individual 
works for the good of all; as far as the poles apart 
from that curious selfishness and isolation in which 
many a dweller in Manhattan so envelops himself 

321 



The Greater America 



that he does not pretend to a bowing acquaintance 
with his next-door neighbor. It is a fresh and 
buoyant spirit, like that of vigorous youth, and can 
be no more vividly expressed than in the hymn of a 
prairie songster which runs like this : 

" Fall in with the big procession, 

Ketch the step and move along 
With the army of progression — 

That's the place where you belong. 
Rise your voice and jine the chorus; 

Swing your hat and shout hooray. 
If your back's weak put a porous 

Plaster on your vertebrae. 
Crawl from under public scorn 

Drop the hammer! Grab a horn! " 

Or again this typical spirit strikes the top note in 
the lusty exhortations scattered broadcast by a West- 
ern Board of Trade : 



BOOST 

Every citizen of Salt Lake City should 
be an Advance Agent of his town. Tell 
the people you meet what we have, what 
we need, and what we are capable of 
doing. 

Don't Knock. Just Boost. 

If you own only a cottage in Salt Lake 
City — you are deeply interested — just as 
deeply as the man or corporations owning 
millions in factories or realty. 

Boost all the time. Every good word 

helps. 

Boost to-day. Boost to-morrow. 



322 



In Conclusion 



Some of these cities have evolved their own peculiar 
slogans of progress to rally their citizens, as soldiers 
of the olden times followed the war cry of their clan 
or leader. In the Northwest you hear, " What can I 
do for Spokane?" or " Portland Leads the Way," 
or " Watch Tacoma Grow," and these legends bom- 
bard you on every hand until you realize that a 
different kind of a spirit is in these people from their 
more conservative cousins of the Atlantic seaboard. 

The journalistic " muck raker " is an eastern prod- 
uct, and his activities have been chiefly confined to 
eastern soil. He takes himself with that immense 
seriousness characteristic of the mental attitude of 
the New Yorker who is inclined to believe that the 
welfare of the nation hangs upon the condition of his 
liver and such other peculiarly local influences as 
tend to color his national view-point. So far as the 
stirring and lusty West is concerned, Manhattan 
Island, over which several million fussy human 
beings scamper to and fro like ants in an over- 
crowded hill, might be scuttled and sunk in the 
Atlantic without impairing the stability of the United 
States. 

The West, which is to be more and more the 
backbone and vitals of America in this twenti- 
eth century, has no time for holding post-mortems 
over Itself. It has an abiding sense of humor 
along with Its tremendous faith In itself and its 
destiny. When a beardless young man not long 
out of college sighs hopelessly and after a swift 

323 



The Greater America 



bird's-eye view of the past, present and future 
sits down to write a lugubrious series of articles 
called " American Rotten to the Core and I Am the 
First to Discover It," the West does not put up its 
shutters and go out of business. It perceives that 
the young man will know better when he is somewhat 
older and that plenty of hardy, outdoor exercise is 
what he most needs at present. 

If your typical Western publicist of brains and 
backbone concludes that a bit of " muck raking " is 
needed in his home garden he goes about it after the 
fashion of William Allen White, who began the 
editorial that was heard around the world with this 
arraignment : 

"what's the matter with KANSAS? 

" We all know, yet here we are at it again. We 
have an old moss-back Jacksonian who snorts and 
howls because there is a bath tub in the State House. 
We are running that old jay for Governor. We have 
another shabby, wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatic who 
has said openly in a dozen speeches that the rights 
of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner. 
We are running him for Chief Justice so that capital 
will come tumbling over itself to get into the State. 
We have raked the old ash-heap of failure in the 
State and found an old human hoop skirt who has 
failed as a business man, who has failed as an editor, 
who has failed as a preacher, and we are going to run 

324 



In Conclusion 



him for Congressman-at-large. He will help the 
looks of the Kansas delegation at Washington. Then 
we have discovered a kid without a law practice and 
have decided to run him for Attorney-General. Then 
for fear some hint that the State had become respect- 
able might percolate through the civilized portion of 
our nation, we have decided to send three or four 
harpies out lecturing, telling the people that Kansas 
is raising hops and letting the corn go to weeds." 

Kansas discovered what was '* the matter with 
her," and to-day her people raise four hundred mil- 
lion dollars' worth of farm products and live stock 
in a year, nearly three hundred dollars' worth for 
every man, woman and child within her borders. 
She has ceased to preach the gospel of discontent 
because she is too busy living and teaching the rest 
of the country that its chief asset is In the soil, as it 
was in the days of our fathers. 

Between 1896 and 1904 the Increase In bank de- 
posits In Kansas was two hundred and nineteen per 
cent., as compared with an Increase for the whole 
United States of but ninety-one per cent. Iowa 
made even a more remarkable showing, for its sav- 
ings banks In the same period swelled their roll of 
depositors two hundred and nine per cent., while the 
United States as a whole recorded an Increase of only 
thirty-six per cent. W. S. Harwood has written in 
his book called " The New Earth," one paragraph 
which focuses the view-point of this vast and pre- 
eminently farming empire of the West : 

325 



The Greater America 



" Time was, and not so very long since, either, 
when the most feared, because the most powerful 
friend or foe the farmer had, was Wall Street. To- 
day the great body of the West, essentially a farming 
body, has become absolutely independent of this pow- 
erful factor. Now and then a farmer, grown rich 
in his new estate, contracts the fever of speculation, 
and is cured or killed by the medicine which Wall 
Street so adroitly administers, but the mass of the 
western producers, recognizing legitimate uses of 
capital as never before, freed from the want and cant 
of demagogues whose only capital is hatred of cap- 
ital, have come to see that their occupation is a busi- 
ness in itself as much as any other; indeed far more 
than this, that they maintain a great manufacturing 
plant, the most colossal in existence, turning out the 
raw materials for the preservation of life itself. They 
have come to realize that they are the independent 
factors; the millions that must be fed, the de- 
pendents." 

But the eastern view is still colored somewhat by 
the Wall Street doctrine, which holds that the founda- 
tions of this mighty nation are shaken when the 
schemes of a few money jugglers miss fire, or a few 
politicians are discovered to be unfit for the offices 
to which they were elected. 

The foregoing impressions in conclusion were 
gleaned from the notebooks of the tenderfoot who 
has written these chapters after a journey which dis- 
covered for him certain regions of the newer America 

326 



In Conclusion 



in which there are big and fine and hopeful lessons 
to be read for the seelcing. He has had to leave un- 
touched, for lack of space, the marvelous develop- 
ment of the Southwest and the new South. Statistics 
could be mobilized by regiments and brigades to 
show that such material expansion and prosperity 
as the world has never known are making empire in 
all those other States where there is still opportunity 
for men to carve their own futures by the power of 
their brawn and brains, notwithstanding the dismal 
yawp of the " muck raker " and the calamity howler. 

Nor is the future of the United States befogged 
with doubts and fears so long as the spirit of its 
people can still be voiced in two brief texts. They 
were worth the cost of this journey, and they are 
vitally and essentially American, now as in the older 
days. 

The one is : 

" // // Looks Good to You, Get to It.'' 
And the other is : 

" Drop the Hammer; Grab a Horn." 



THE END 



327 



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